9 ms·

Is there any accurate analysis of exactly what Microsoft collects in Windows 10? I understand you cannot totally disable the telemetry (with the exception of an

by satysin 10y ago

Is there any accurate analysis of exactly what Microsoft collects in Windows 10? I understand you cannot totally disable the telemetry (with the exception of an Enterprise version) but when put down to the "basic" level is there any capture of what is being sent? Everything I have seen is bullshit anti-Microsoft fairy tale stuff. I understand text and voice data will be captured and sent if you use Cortana but that is pretty obvious, the same is true of Google, Bing, Siri, etc. [0] What I want to know is when I put things at the lowest setting possible what do MS get and how often? Edit: [0] I mean captured and sent for processing. I expect (perhaps wrongly) for it to be deleted from Microsoft's servers as soon as my request has been answered. Unlike Google which stores everything you say to Google Now for example.

lucb1e 10y ago
> I understand text and voice data will be captured and sent if you use Cortana but that is pretty obvious. Not really. I was surprised both by Google storing every voice recognition sample they've ever received, and I was also surprised that people weren't totally creeped out and outraged at discovering this. Most people admit to being a little creeped out, but get over it very quickly. Most people don't know this, and I didn't expect it either. Having used voice recognition in the past (like, 8 years ago) they were just programs that worked very badly, but they were the state of the art back then. That they now upload everything ever is recent news to me. It's not all "bullshit anti-{bigCorp} fairy tales" if it's something people genuinely didn't expect.
- bad_user 10y ago
  IMHO, Google storing voice recognition samples does freak me out, especially because voice recognition is automatically activated by "OK Google" and maybe other triggers and maybe depending on version or the hardware used it's not that good - for example when my wife plays songs on her LG phone, she gets Google's voice recognition activated erroneously all the time. So basically random bugs can get your very private conversations recorded on servers that can be under the control of state agencies and disgruntled employees, possibly stored forever? That's a reason to freak out really.
  - _lce0 10y ago
    "I will tell you my secret plans to world domination, but first need you to do something for me. OK? Google this for me and ..."
  - laserDinosaur 10y ago
    >IMHO, Google storing voice recognition samples does freak me out, especially because voice recognition is automatically activated by "OK Google" I've had google search activate a few times by my wife watching TV in the background and once when it was sitting in front of my speakers while listening to a podcast. We've tried going back and replaying the same bits but can never get it to activate in the same place twice. Still, it is strange to be sitting there and suddenly have the Google mic pop up.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    And how are we sure it isn't recording when you're NOT saying OK Google? :-) Is there an analogue for a piece of scotch tape over the webcam for the paranoid (Zuckerbergs) of the world?
    - bad_user 10y ago
      I think battery life and 4G network bandwidth are constraints for now. If it would record and stream data while in standby, battery wouldn't last for more than a few hours and would visibly consume your allocated bandwidth. What they do is to introduce a dedicated processor that listens for these keywords and that is supposed to wake the phone up on detection. The danger of course is having that processor activate the phone on keywords other than "OK Google". And it doesn't even have to be on purpose. As I said, my wife's phone detection is totally broken for some reason.
      - EGreg 10y ago
        It doesn't need to stream all the time, just record. The traffic is encrypted end-to-end anyway, you can only do an analysis on the size relative to how much time it's been idle.
      - 10y ago
- satysin 10y ago
  Ah I should clarify I was talking about it being "captured and sent" as part of Cortana using "the cloud" to do the "heavy lifting" on the server. I wasn't talking about it being stored. I do not know if Cortana saves everything you say like Google does? If it does I cannot find any option to view and delete this data like I can in the Google Dashboard. And yes I agree it is disturbing that so much is saved. I remember the first time I opened the audio recordings area in Google Dashboard and my jaw hit the floor at just how much it had captured. Thankfully you can delete it easily. Well delete it from view, I don't believe for a second it is truly gone.
kardos 10y ago
You and a large number of others would like to know what is in the telemetry. If I recall correctly, the problem is that it's all TLS wrapped with pinned certs (no source on that at the moment). You'd be doing the internet community a favour if you figured out a way to decode the "telemetry" packets to see what's actually in there.
- satysin 10y ago
  Yeah network capture isn't going to be any use as it is all encrypted. I was wondering if anyone had registry and file system captures on what was being collected, if that is even possible. It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft using private APIs to collect data and bypass monitoring tools. If they are it would look even worse though. All of the FUD and other misinformation from random people on YouTube is annoying. I just want a straight answer.
  - chli 10y ago
    The "private API, telemetry data doesn't go the normal route through the stack" is claimed in the most recent release of "Canard PC Hardware" (n°29) which is a half decent french computer magazine.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I'm still kind of surprised this hasn't been reverse-engineered. It ought to be possible to find the process that's doing it and hijack its use of the crypto DLLs to record what data is passed in. Do you still get telemetry data when it's run in a VM?
  - nikbackm 10y ago
    > I'm still kind of surprised this hasn't been reverse-engineered. Yeah. Maybe another sign of Microsoft's increasing lack of relevance if no enterprising hacker cares to investigate it.
jrcii 10y ago
I administer a network of about 100 computers. One night I was monitoring the logs for the web proxy on the front of the network. It was around 2 AM and no one was there but me, so I was surprised to see dozens of connections streaming by with URLs like microsoft.com/userdata.aspx. I figured out it was the one box on the network that upgraded itself to Windows 10. Very disconcerting.
- ryuuchin 10y ago
  > I figured out it was the one box on the network that upgraded itself to Windows 10. Very disconcerting. Sounds like an oversight by IT. On corporate/enterprise network the Windows 10 upgrade should be disabled through group policy.
  - jrcii 10y ago
    "IT" is me :) And yes it was an oversight, the rest of the network is comprised of thin clients running RDP, this was the one regular Windows box. Since replaced.
jmnicolas 10y ago
> you cannot totally disable the telemetry (with the exception of an Enterprise version) Are we sure that the Enterprise version doesn't send anything ? Honestly I'd be ready to pay a premium for having an otherwise good OS respect my privacy.
- actsasbuffoon 10y ago
  The enterprise edition allows you to disable more telemetry than the other versions, but it still sends some data back. There is currently no Microsoft-endorsed way to disable all telemetry, no matter how much money you pay, or which version of the software you buy. I'm excited by France's decision. I hope the telemetry-free version of Windows 10 will be available outside of France, because I'd happily pay a bunch of money for it. As it stands, I'm stuck on Windows 7 because I don't like the UI in Windows 8, and I'm not a fan of the telemetry in Windows 10. I've only run into a handful of apps that don't work because my OS isn't compatible with very new versions of DirectX/.NET, but these problems will only become more common with time.
  - tonmoy 10y ago
    You do realize you are missing out on huge performance boost by not upgrading to 8 just because you don't like the UI, right?
    - actsasbuffoon 10y ago
      Yes, I do. I have a hard enough time with the UI that I'm willing to accept a performance penalty. I'm colorblind, and the flat design makes it very hard for me to figure out what's clickable. Things like borders, shadow, and shading provide valuable visual hints about which parts of the UI can be interacted with. I've heard that Windows 10 has walked back some of the more problematic design changes.
    - whyoh 10y ago
      Oh, come on! There is no huge performance boost. In fact, based on most properly done benchmarks, there isn't any performance boost at all! The whole "myth" of a performance boost probably started simply because they added a new startup mode in W8, called "Fast Startup", which is basically just partial hibernation. So even saying that it boots faster isn't correct; regular boot, sleep and hibernation are still just as fast as they were on W7.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Sylos 10y ago
As far as I understand it, there is no way to know what Microsoft sends, unless you work at Microsoft. As such, the "bullshit anti-Microsoft fairy tale stuff" is just as valid as whatever you believe that they send. Especially also under the connotation, that Microsoft does actually reserve the right to send anything they want in their Privacy Statement. And we shouldn't treat privacy as "innocent until proven guilty". If they cannot provide a lower boundary where you have a guarantee that they respect it, then we should assume the worst.
- adventured 10y ago
  > just as valid as whatever you believe that they send Just because multiple things are possible in this case, that doesn't inherently mean all things are equally plausible. Otherwise we'd have to pretend that the lizard people conspiracy theory is as likely as anything else that has yet to be proven. Your premise drops the critical consideration of plausibility and declares all possibilities equal, no matter how fantastical. That's the same logic error that leads people to believe one roulette wheel spin influences the next, and that if you have two possibilities then the odds must always be 50/50 regardless of context.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Right, I didn't expect someone to put my comment through their formal logic interpreter which doesn't make any assumptions about context and meaning whatsoever. What I meant was that any bullshit anti-Microsoft fairy tale stuff, which is not trivially disprovable as physically impossible or clearly illogical for Microsoft to do, is just as valid as whatever he/she believes. That is, as long as his/her beliefs are also within this same range of thinkable things that Microsoft could do, as otherwise those other claims would actually be more valid.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Why would Microsoft reserve the right to upload absolutely anything they want from your computer if they had no plans of uploading things you don't expect them to? You can claim that Microsoft spying on their clients again¹ is a fantastical proposition all you want. It does not make it so. 1 - They were caught a few times doing that already, and even stealing IP.
RaleyField 10y ago
> Is there any accurate analysis of exactly what Microsoft collects in Windows 10? Microsoft could easily demystify this by writing detailed document detailing what is being sent but unfortunately there isn't one. Even if it was, part of the outrage is that some most egregious options are opt-out and easy to miss if you are not technically inclined and just went through unintended upgrade. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/configure-windows-telemetry-in-your-organization https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con... Most lists are open-ended, they will start with "such as" so you can't be sure there isn't anything more. Even then under basic level I fail to see why they'd need to take my IMEI number or device attributes of presumably every piece of hardware I connect to my computer. Then there's another group of settings related to privacy, the most troublesome is "Send Microsoft info about how I write" which seems intentionally vague about what it does, but it's been suggested that it sends keystrokes to Microsoft and we know this feature is included in Windows due to this bit from privacy statement: "Microsoft collects and uses data about your speech, inking (handwriting), and typing on Windows devices to help improve and personalize our ability to correctly recognize your input."
- yuhong 10y ago
  I think it is to allow drivers to be looked for on Windows Update.
- noxToken 10y ago
  > "Send Microsoft info about how I write" I obviously have no more definitive insight than you, but it seems most people agree that this refers to inking. It's data about handwriting and character recognition. We can't say for certain that it doesn't include information about keystrokes and sentence structures/patterns, but it's the most obvious. Occam, Hanlon, and a bunch of other razor manufacturers and all that jazz.
big_youth 10y ago
This is a good starting point. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services#BKMK_MoreUTC https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/man...
rasz_pl 10y ago
_EVERYTHING_ every mouse click, every letter typed, every program installed, timestamps of start/shutdown of every executable, serial number of every usb drive plugged in, etc etc etc
- isoprophlex 10y ago
  Do you have a source on which this rather strong claim is based?
  - chopin 10y ago
    Windows 10 telemetry is encrypted. Anyone can state anything about what's sent. Non one knows for sure. Do have any evidence that is only sent what Microoft states it would? Trust but verify.
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      All the things I listed are logged in W10, and most of them were never logged in W7/W8.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    install W10 and watch your total host writes (for example crystaldiskinfo) per day just browsing the web for couple of days. It will average ~5-10GB/day, most of it is logs.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  too late to edit, people thing im lying/joking/trolling. Ever wondered whats in C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\WMI\RtBackup ? you cant look inside, system only. Performance Monitor > Data Collector Sets > Event Trace Sessions will give you an idea.
_RPM 10y ago
I'm planning on a getting a null modem and connecting a Windows 10 box to it, and also do some kind of TCPDUMP on the wire. I'm hoping this will be easy to do. I've actually read the privacy policy that is linked from the Windows 8.1 operating system. It's pretty frighting what they collect. They're browser is basically spyware with the things it collects. What I want to know is this: If I use Chrome, or Firefox, are they still somehow collecting my browsing data? I know that IE is actually built into the Windows operating system.
- mhurron 10y ago
  > I'm planning on a getting a null modem and connecting a Windows 10 box to it, and also do some kind of TCPDUMP on the wire. I'm hoping this will be easy to do. Actually seeing everywhere a local machine is sending data to is easy. Figuring out what it is sending is significantly harder if the traffic is encrypted in transit, which Windows 10 telemetry is.
shostack 10y ago
I wonder if the safer approach at this point is to assume that Microsoft can collect anything, including keystrokes, audio/video input, screen captures, etc. until proven otherwise. Further, and something I don't see discussed as much, is their apparent ability to force through whatever "improvements" they want to this tracking via their now-impossible-to-fully-disable Windows Updates system. Is it entirely unreasonable to expect them to use that for targeted delivery of payloads on "terror suspects" or what not? I realize that might be a bit in the tin-foil hat territory, but until proven otherwise, I feel like we need to assume that capability now exists.

by satysin 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago

> I understand text and voice data will be captured and sent if you use Cortana but that is pretty obvious. Not really. I was surprised both by Google storing every voice recognition sample they've ever received, and I was also surprised that people weren't totally creeped out and outraged at discovering this. Most people admit to being a little creeped out, but get over it very quickly. Most people don't know this, and I didn't expect it either. Having used voice recognition in the past (like, 8 years ago) they were just programs that worked very badly, but they were the state of the art back then. That they now upload everything ever is recent news to me. It's not all "bullshit anti-{bigCorp} fairy tales" if it's something people genuinely didn't expect.

bad_user 10y ago
IMHO, Google storing voice recognition samples does freak me out, especially because voice recognition is automatically activated by "OK Google" and maybe other triggers and maybe depending on version or the hardware used it's not that good - for example when my wife plays songs on her LG phone, she gets Google's voice recognition activated erroneously all the time. So basically random bugs can get your very private conversations recorded on servers that can be under the control of state agencies and disgruntled employees, possibly stored forever? That's a reason to freak out really.
- _lce0 10y ago
  "I will tell you my secret plans to world domination, but first need you to do something for me. OK? Google this for me and ..."
- laserDinosaur 10y ago
  >IMHO, Google storing voice recognition samples does freak me out, especially because voice recognition is automatically activated by "OK Google" I've had google search activate a few times by my wife watching TV in the background and once when it was sitting in front of my speakers while listening to a podcast. We've tried going back and replaying the same bits but can never get it to activate in the same place twice. Still, it is strange to be sitting there and suddenly have the Google mic pop up.
- EGreg 10y ago
  And how are we sure it isn't recording when you're NOT saying OK Google? :-) Is there an analogue for a piece of scotch tape over the webcam for the paranoid (Zuckerbergs) of the world?
  - bad_user 10y ago
    I think battery life and 4G network bandwidth are constraints for now. If it would record and stream data while in standby, battery wouldn't last for more than a few hours and would visibly consume your allocated bandwidth. What they do is to introduce a dedicated processor that listens for these keywords and that is supposed to wake the phone up on detection. The danger of course is having that processor activate the phone on keywords other than "OK Google". And it doesn't even have to be on purpose. As I said, my wife's phone detection is totally broken for some reason.
    - EGreg 10y ago
      It doesn't need to stream all the time, just record. The traffic is encrypted end-to-end anyway, you can only do an analysis on the size relative to how much time it's been idle.
    - 10y ago
satysin 10y ago
Ah I should clarify I was talking about it being "captured and sent" as part of Cortana using "the cloud" to do the "heavy lifting" on the server. I wasn't talking about it being stored. I do not know if Cortana saves everything you say like Google does? If it does I cannot find any option to view and delete this data like I can in the Google Dashboard. And yes I agree it is disturbing that so much is saved. I remember the first time I opened the audio recordings area in Google Dashboard and my jaw hit the floor at just how much it had captured. Thankfully you can delete it easily. Well delete it from view, I don't believe for a second it is truly gone.

kardos 10y ago

You and a large number of others would like to know what is in the telemetry. If I recall correctly, the problem is that it's all TLS wrapped with pinned certs (no source on that at the moment). You'd be doing the internet community a favour if you figured out a way to decode the "telemetry" packets to see what's actually in there.

satysin 10y ago
Yeah network capture isn't going to be any use as it is all encrypted. I was wondering if anyone had registry and file system captures on what was being collected, if that is even possible. It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft using private APIs to collect data and bypass monitoring tools. If they are it would look even worse though. All of the FUD and other misinformation from random people on YouTube is annoying. I just want a straight answer.
- chli 10y ago
  The "private API, telemetry data doesn't go the normal route through the stack" is claimed in the most recent release of "Canard PC Hardware" (n°29) which is a half decent french computer magazine.
pjc50 10y ago
I'm still kind of surprised this hasn't been reverse-engineered. It ought to be possible to find the process that's doing it and hijack its use of the crypto DLLs to record what data is passed in. Do you still get telemetry data when it's run in a VM?
- nikbackm 10y ago
  > I'm still kind of surprised this hasn't been reverse-engineered. Yeah. Maybe another sign of Microsoft's increasing lack of relevance if no enterprising hacker cares to investigate it.

jrcii 10y ago

I administer a network of about 100 computers. One night I was monitoring the logs for the web proxy on the front of the network. It was around 2 AM and no one was there but me, so I was surprised to see dozens of connections streaming by with URLs like microsoft.com/userdata.aspx. I figured out it was the one box on the network that upgraded itself to Windows 10. Very disconcerting.

ryuuchin 10y ago
> I figured out it was the one box on the network that upgraded itself to Windows 10. Very disconcerting. Sounds like an oversight by IT. On corporate/enterprise network the Windows 10 upgrade should be disabled through group policy.
- jrcii 10y ago
  "IT" is me :) And yes it was an oversight, the rest of the network is comprised of thin clients running RDP, this was the one regular Windows box. Since replaced.

jmnicolas 10y ago

> you cannot totally disable the telemetry (with the exception of an Enterprise version) Are we sure that the Enterprise version doesn't send anything ? Honestly I'd be ready to pay a premium for having an otherwise good OS respect my privacy.

actsasbuffoon 10y ago
The enterprise edition allows you to disable more telemetry than the other versions, but it still sends some data back. There is currently no Microsoft-endorsed way to disable all telemetry, no matter how much money you pay, or which version of the software you buy. I'm excited by France's decision. I hope the telemetry-free version of Windows 10 will be available outside of France, because I'd happily pay a bunch of money for it. As it stands, I'm stuck on Windows 7 because I don't like the UI in Windows 8, and I'm not a fan of the telemetry in Windows 10. I've only run into a handful of apps that don't work because my OS isn't compatible with very new versions of DirectX/.NET, but these problems will only become more common with time.
- tonmoy 10y ago
  You do realize you are missing out on huge performance boost by not upgrading to 8 just because you don't like the UI, right?
  - actsasbuffoon 10y ago
    Yes, I do. I have a hard enough time with the UI that I'm willing to accept a performance penalty. I'm colorblind, and the flat design makes it very hard for me to figure out what's clickable. Things like borders, shadow, and shading provide valuable visual hints about which parts of the UI can be interacted with. I've heard that Windows 10 has walked back some of the more problematic design changes.
  - whyoh 10y ago
    Oh, come on! There is no huge performance boost. In fact, based on most properly done benchmarks, there isn't any performance boost at all! The whole "myth" of a performance boost probably started simply because they added a new startup mode in W8, called "Fast Startup", which is basically just partial hibernation. So even saying that it boots faster isn't correct; regular boot, sleep and hibernation are still just as fast as they were on W7.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Sylos 10y ago

As far as I understand it, there is no way to know what Microsoft sends, unless you work at Microsoft. As such, the "bullshit anti-Microsoft fairy tale stuff" is just as valid as whatever you believe that they send. Especially also under the connotation, that Microsoft does actually reserve the right to send anything they want in their Privacy Statement. And we shouldn't treat privacy as "innocent until proven guilty". If they cannot provide a lower boundary where you have a guarantee that they respect it, then we should assume the worst.

adventured 10y ago
> just as valid as whatever you believe that they send Just because multiple things are possible in this case, that doesn't inherently mean all things are equally plausible. Otherwise we'd have to pretend that the lizard people conspiracy theory is as likely as anything else that has yet to be proven. Your premise drops the critical consideration of plausibility and declares all possibilities equal, no matter how fantastical. That's the same logic error that leads people to believe one roulette wheel spin influences the next, and that if you have two possibilities then the odds must always be 50/50 regardless of context.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Right, I didn't expect someone to put my comment through their formal logic interpreter which doesn't make any assumptions about context and meaning whatsoever. What I meant was that any bullshit anti-Microsoft fairy tale stuff, which is not trivially disprovable as physically impossible or clearly illogical for Microsoft to do, is just as valid as whatever he/she believes. That is, as long as his/her beliefs are also within this same range of thinkable things that Microsoft could do, as otherwise those other claims would actually be more valid.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Why would Microsoft reserve the right to upload absolutely anything they want from your computer if they had no plans of uploading things you don't expect them to? You can claim that Microsoft spying on their clients again¹ is a fantastical proposition all you want. It does not make it so. 1 - They were caught a few times doing that already, and even stealing IP.

RaleyField 10y ago

> Is there any accurate analysis of exactly what Microsoft collects in Windows 10? Microsoft could easily demystify this by writing detailed document detailing what is being sent but unfortunately there isn't one. Even if it was, part of the outrage is that some most egregious options are opt-out and easy to miss if you are not technically inclined and just went through unintended upgrade. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/configure-windows-telemetry-in-your-organization https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con... Most lists are open-ended, they will start with "such as" so you can't be sure there isn't anything more. Even then under basic level I fail to see why they'd need to take my IMEI number or device attributes of presumably every piece of hardware I connect to my computer. Then there's another group of settings related to privacy, the most troublesome is "Send Microsoft info about how I write" which seems intentionally vague about what it does, but it's been suggested that it sends keystrokes to Microsoft and we know this feature is included in Windows due to this bit from privacy statement: "Microsoft collects and uses data about your speech, inking (handwriting), and typing on Windows devices to help improve and personalize our ability to correctly recognize your input."

yuhong 10y ago
I think it is to allow drivers to be looked for on Windows Update.
noxToken 10y ago
> "Send Microsoft info about how I write" I obviously have no more definitive insight than you, but it seems most people agree that this refers to inking. It's data about handwriting and character recognition. We can't say for certain that it doesn't include information about keystrokes and sentence structures/patterns, but it's the most obvious. Occam, Hanlon, and a bunch of other razor manufacturers and all that jazz.

big_youth 10y ago

This is a good starting point. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services#BKMK_MoreUTC https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/man...

rasz_pl 10y ago

_EVERYTHING_ every mouse click, every letter typed, every program installed, timestamps of start/shutdown of every executable, serial number of every usb drive plugged in, etc etc etc

isoprophlex 10y ago
Do you have a source on which this rather strong claim is based?
- chopin 10y ago
  Windows 10 telemetry is encrypted. Anyone can state anything about what's sent. Non one knows for sure. Do have any evidence that is only sent what Microoft states it would? Trust but verify.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    All the things I listed are logged in W10, and most of them were never logged in W7/W8.
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  install W10 and watch your total host writes (for example crystaldiskinfo) per day just browsing the web for couple of days. It will average ~5-10GB/day, most of it is logs.
rasz_pl 10y ago
too late to edit, people thing im lying/joking/trolling. Ever wondered whats in C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\WMI\RtBackup ? you cant look inside, system only. Performance Monitor > Data Collector Sets > Event Trace Sessions will give you an idea.

_RPM 10y ago

I'm planning on a getting a null modem and connecting a Windows 10 box to it, and also do some kind of TCPDUMP on the wire. I'm hoping this will be easy to do. I've actually read the privacy policy that is linked from the Windows 8.1 operating system. It's pretty frighting what they collect. They're browser is basically spyware with the things it collects. What I want to know is this: If I use Chrome, or Firefox, are they still somehow collecting my browsing data? I know that IE is actually built into the Windows operating system.

mhurron 10y ago
> I'm planning on a getting a null modem and connecting a Windows 10 box to it, and also do some kind of TCPDUMP on the wire. I'm hoping this will be easy to do. Actually seeing everywhere a local machine is sending data to is easy. Figuring out what it is sending is significantly harder if the traffic is encrypted in transit, which Windows 10 telemetry is.

shostack 10y ago

I wonder if the safer approach at this point is to assume that Microsoft can collect anything, including keystrokes, audio/video input, screen captures, etc. until proven otherwise. Further, and something I don't see discussed as much, is their apparent ability to force through whatever "improvements" they want to this tracking via their now-impossible-to-fully-disable Windows Updates system. Is it entirely unreasonable to expect them to use that for targeted delivery of payloads on "terror suspects" or what not? I realize that might be a bit in the tin-foil hat territory, but until proven otherwise, I feel like we need to assume that capability now exists.