8 ms·
>Engineers, with permission from Microsoft’s privacy governance team, can obtain users' documents that trigger crashes in applications, so they can work out wha
by rl3 10y ago
>Engineers, with permission from Microsoft’s privacy governance team, can obtain users' documents that trigger crashes in applications, so they can work out what's going wrong. The techies can also run diagnostic tools remotely on the computers, again with permission from their overseers.
So in other words: engineering access to your personal documents (and computer) is mediated by a group of people who also shouldn't have access in the first place. Got it.
When I close my eyes, it's almost like I can vividly picture the crappy NSA PowerPoint slides that must exist, detailing "Windows telemetry exploitation" or some such. At the very least, the information has to be incredibly useful for targeting purposes.
- pjc50 10y agoSomeone should file a mass copyright infringement suit. Did they really have permission to copy those documents? Charge them on the RIAA scale of thousands of dollars per infringing copy. There's implications for legal discovery here too. Remember the other day when one of the documents in the Uber/Otto case was found on a user's machine? What happens when people start sending in discovery fishing expeditions to get documents from Microsoft?
- muraiki 10y agoAlso, think about them obtaining HIPAA protected data...
- cm2187 10y agoCopyright? What about attorney-client privilege or medical secrecy?
- kranner 10y agoNot sure that it's copyright infringement. It is straight-up theft though.
- cmdrfred 10y agoI believe you are correct as I understand it the crime is in the distribution not the possession.
- pjc50 10y agoThe offence is the act of copying.
- cmdrfred 10y agoDo you have a source? This is what I'm going off of. "How do I know what's legal and what's not when it comes to copying music/movies? Here's the bottom line: If you distribute copyrighted music/movies without authorization from the copyright owner, you are breaking the law. (Distribution can mean anything from "sharing" files on the Internet to burning copies of copyrighted material onto blank CDs, DVDs, or Flash drives, and selling or giving them to others.)" http://dmca.ucr.edu/faqs.html http://dmca.ucr.edu/faqs.html
- pjc50 10y agoExact phrasing depends on jurisdiction, but see: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf especially §106 Exclusive rights in copyrighted works p16 "Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords" Reproduction is infringement. Distribution of copies is also infringement but carries separate penalties. There's all sorts of carveouts and caveats, but remember Sony v Betamax: it took a court case to invent the time-shift exemption that making a copy of a broadcast TV program wasn't infringement.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- driverdan 10y agoThere is no copyright infringement. Anyone running Win10 has agreed to give them access via the EULA.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoExcept where I haven't. EULA's aren't law in my opinion, and that's what laws are: opinions, collectively. I can't be forced to agree to something that strongly violates other contracts I'm required to be a party to, in my opinion. All we need are rulings, and the enactment of laws, to support my opinion along with the cessation of wholesale data collection by the OS vendor. While we're waiting for that all we have is technical solutions.
- tinus_hn 10y agoAlthough I can run Windows 10, I cannot give them the right to copy some of the documents that I keep on the system. The copyright to those files belongs to someone else.
- aanm1988 10y agoWhat do you think the EULA is for?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoThe worst part is that this is hyper-targeted and by request, which is the worst possible version of NSA targeting.
- MikusR 10y agoThe worst part is that the user has to intentionally enable Full diagnostics for this to happen.
- Tepix 10y agoIsn't enabled by default and the user has to intentionally disable it? I installed Windows 10 on a computer last week and every single privacy option was set to the more invasive default. I had to change them all.
- EasyTiger_ 10y agoCorrect. Also they have a tendency to revert settings to those which benefit MS more - they claim 'bugs' but their bugs always seem to benefit themselves.
- brianwawok 10y agoYes this is why I dumped win 10. I can't turn off defender. I have to registry hack to shut it down, then it comes back in a week. Nope. I don't care how much MS pretends to change. They are still scum.
- lightbyte 10y agoWhy would you want to turn off defender? It's the best anti-virus you can get on W10.
- ycombinete 10y agoWhat do you base this claim on?
- einr 10y agoIf they are actually making copies of my documents, can anyone explain how Microsoft is not in blatant violation of the copyright laws of pretty much every country? They are actually potentially making unlawful copies of my copyrighted works, no? Not to mention that they are undoubtedly copying trade secrets, state secrets, private patient data from hospitals, and on, and on, and on... This seems like it should be an actual big deal. How is it allowed to continue?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoBecause they're "not using the data". They would probably claim to be a dumb carrier(ala the postal service, even when mail is searched).
- xorblurb 10y agoOf course they are using the data. They are not collecting it (mainly) for the NSA, but primarily for themselves.
- hedora 10y agoLaws around copyright and state secrets don't have this idea of "using the data" you refer to. They focus on copying, since "using the data" would involve showing intent, which is hard to do. ISP's have argued that transmitting data doesn't count as making intermediate copies (even though router buffers do make copies), and the courts have largely bought that argument. (Also, there are laws specifically covering searching mail; the post office doesn't have to make legal arguments one was or another about it.)
- marcosdumay 10y ago> ISP's have argued that transmitting data doesn't count as making intermediate copies, and the courts have largely bought that argument. And yet, the only reason EULAs are valid is because some court decided that copying software from the disk to memory for execution counts as making intermediary copies... Go figure.
- 10y ago
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoJesus fucking christ! What are they thinking! I cannot comprehend how an organization of Microsoft's size was able to deploy this without huge internal pushback. There's really no excuse for any of the HN crowd to be running this garbage. It's RCE as a feature! Linux, Linux, Linux, guys.
- saiya-jin 10y agoactually, win7 64b should be enough for few more years (till 2020) if one prefers win platform, no? (games, drivers, lightroom and so on... wine is not the proper way for many)
- nebabyte 10y ago> internal pushback I'm really curious what you're imagining the corporate structure to be like here - what kind of "internal pushback" are you envisioning? In particular, I don't see engineers as particularly getting paid to or even having access to the parameters of the specs they're fulfilling. Anyone bothering to wonder would likely just assume the system they'd be working on to do this would be fully covered by 'legal' in specific agreements with firms to track that info, or if asked would be told that the spec is what it is and not anything about the use case. Legal, meanwhile, isn't going to take money to tell MS what they can't or 'shouldn't' do; but rather just to ensure they don't have exposure in doing whatever they want to do. So I guess that just leaves the leadership - which you could argue you're surprised by, if the board/C-levels/etc were individuals particularly known for being privacy-oriented. (Yeah. At Microsoft.) Meanwhile, you have a likely strong potential profit motive in a platform able to shift that kind of control to devs, though at the 'cost' of potentially losing privacy-concerned users - and their profit motive believes they can just EEE those users out of a market of competing products, so they give the go-ahead. So if there's a 'pushback' module that failed in this scenario, perhaps I don't see it; but I don't really see at what point you'd expect something like this to be 'stopped' internally.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI seriously hope not. That sounds like a really fucked up culture, that's definitely not normal. Moral integrity as an engineer should cause you to speak up regardless of your salary and with enough internal noise higher ups should rethink their strategy.
- nebabyte 10y ago> When I close my eyes, it's almost like I can vividly picture the crappy NSA PowerPoint slides that must exist, detailing "Windows telemetry exploitation" or some such With approval from the gods-on-high at Microsoft, you can stop imagining and have your application fetch those slides for you! :D