3 ms·

Windows 10 Sends Your Activity History to Microsoft, Even If You Tell It Not To

76 points by sky_nox 8y ago

RickS 8y ago
This has the same feel to me as the use of "unlimited" in cell phone plans – a semantic looseness that hovers north of criminal but south of acceptable. It seems companies are free to make technical claims of questionable veracity with little fear of consequence. No wonder – we seem unable to elect leaders who take this topic seriously. It's a lot harder to get away with this crap in the food and drug industry. I bought 4 boxes of tea yesterday and one of them is littered with legalese for having included valerian root. There were 4 asterisks on the front of the chicken sausage, following words like "Natural". Parsing the information can be tedious, but I think it's wonderful that those industries have a more difficult time concealing their shenanigans. Though there are still many tricks – "free range" and "grass fed" have loopholes you could drive a herd through. Ultimately, companies are going to keep doing this to us for as long as it's profitable, and until we give them a compelling reason to stop.
- T3OU-736 8y ago
  While I do not disagree with your points, I would argue that it is more likely that this is a prime candidate for Hanlon's razor. The attribute substitution heuristic makes ts easy to treat Microsoft as this single homogenous entity, but given its size and the diverse number of groups working on things, this diverse set of toggles of how to disable all the crappy ways in which they collect data is likely just a result of these multiple groups finding their own toggle a place in the settings panel. Should they, as a company who has made loud noises claiming to care about user privacy (data centers in Ireland) be a lot better about disclosing everything they collect, _how_ they collect it, and ALL the ways to disable said collection mechanism(s)? Absolutely. But to assume that they do not do this because malice? Nah, incompetence due to low actual business priority of caring about end user privacy seems more likely.
  - RickS 8y ago
    I 100% agree – I do not attribute this specific microsoft issue to malice. It's insanely hard to coordinate between teams at their scale, especially when feature ownership is partially shared in difficult-to-model ways. (I do attribute the misuse of "unlimited" by phone companies to malice, FWIW.) My point is more that microsoft, like any company, could implement processes to better catch this class of errors before they ship, but don't, because there are too few consequences for making mistakes, and so there's no incentive to improve prevention efforts.
guggle 8y ago
Just history repeating. Free fancy IDEs can't change everything.

76 points by sky_nox 8y ago

This has the same feel to me as the use of "unlimited" in cell phone plans – a semantic looseness that hovers north of criminal but south of acceptable. It seems companies are free to make technical claims of questionable veracity with little fear of consequence. No wonder – we seem unable to elect leaders who take this topic seriously. It's a lot harder to get away with this crap in the food and drug industry. I bought 4 boxes of tea yesterday and one of them is littered with legalese for having included valerian root. There were 4 asterisks on the front of the chicken sausage, following words like "Natural". Parsing the information can be tedious, but I think it's wonderful that those industries have a more difficult time concealing their shenanigans. Though there are still many tricks – "free range" and "grass fed" have loopholes you could drive a herd through. Ultimately, companies are going to keep doing this to us for as long as it's profitable, and until we give them a compelling reason to stop.

T3OU-736 8y ago
While I do not disagree with your points, I would argue that it is more likely that this is a prime candidate for Hanlon's razor. The attribute substitution heuristic makes ts easy to treat Microsoft as this single homogenous entity, but given its size and the diverse number of groups working on things, this diverse set of toggles of how to disable all the crappy ways in which they collect data is likely just a result of these multiple groups finding their own toggle a place in the settings panel. Should they, as a company who has made loud noises claiming to care about user privacy (data centers in Ireland) be a lot better about disclosing everything they collect, _how_ they collect it, and ALL the ways to disable said collection mechanism(s)? Absolutely. But to assume that they do not do this because malice? Nah, incompetence due to low actual business priority of caring about end user privacy seems more likely.
- RickS 8y ago
  I 100% agree – I do not attribute this specific microsoft issue to malice. It's insanely hard to coordinate between teams at their scale, especially when feature ownership is partially shared in difficult-to-model ways. (I do attribute the misuse of "unlimited" by phone companies to malice, FWIW.) My point is more that microsoft, like any company, could implement processes to better catch this class of errors before they ship, but don't, because there are too few consequences for making mistakes, and so there's no incentive to improve prevention efforts.

guggle 8y ago

Just history repeating. Free fancy IDEs can't change everything.