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Sure, someone could. But it's easy enough to obfuscate it so that it would be extremely difficult to tell for sure. There's a reason why making things verifiabl

Sure, someone could. But it's easy enough to obfuscate it so that it would be extremely difficult to tell for sure. There's a reason why making things verifiably FOSS is such a big deal. "Someone would surely catch them and embarrass them" isn't a great reason to trust them.

MichaelGG 10y ago
Of course. But is it worth a billion dollars or whatever the, say, EU, might decide to fine them if caught? Plus the added compliance costs of whatever a court decides they need to do? Not to mention press and loss of government contracts, etc. There should be a project to fund some research into this, verifying some popular closed source clients.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  It probably is worth it. Look at VW, "surely someone would catch them" worked out for them for years, and was quite profitable for them.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    I suspect Microsoft's upside in capturing more details (websites visited?) for use in what, advertising?, less than VW's upside in circumventing physics. Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      > Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients. Why would it be? You don't have to tell advertisers how you got the data, just that you can show their ads to a certain demographic. And "websites visited" is just one of the things they can collect. Being able to advertise based on your documents, work-flow, social interactions, etc is probably much more powerful.