6 ms·

It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden

It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden. I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning

pm90 7y ago
@ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but: * a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and * the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age The incentives today are very very well aligned for a corporation to sell user data. Even if a company may mostly be made of good people, without explicitly written contracts or declarations of any kind, a Company can change internal policies rather quickly. Maybe there will be a manager who sees the selling of that data as a way to boost profit and rise within the company. Maybe the company sells that division along with their data.
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  s/gold/oil/
- ionised 7y ago
  You say the issue is not insincerity but I beg to differ. Microsoft has never been particularly sincere about the reasons it does the things it does. It has been a deceitful bully of a company for a long time. Indeed, one of the main reasons why there is so little trust in corporations is because they are so insincere, anti-consumer and lacking in any kind of social conscience.
  - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
    I get it - I do. I'm a recent returnee to MSFT, after many years working not at MSFT, and I remember what it was like. We can't rewind and fix the past, but we absolutely can be better working forward, and we will.
- TheIronYuppie 7y ago
  I totally get it. We're a big company, and you're right to question EVERYTHING. All I can say is we'll try and earn your trust every day and laws like GDPR make sure that we're on the hook to do so. Put another way - we CANNOT change this without EXPLICITLY notifying you.
yellowapple 7y ago
> We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Not sure about the Azure team (since my experience with Azure is limited to a one-off project that required a SQL Server instance to test compatibility with some client's legacy DB, plus some very recent dabbling in VS Code and Azure Data Studio), but whichever team runs Windows nowadays, for example, hasn't exactly "shown [them]selves to be good actors". Or is preinstalling Candy Crush even on "Professional" versions of Windows 10 considered being a "good actor" by today's standards? (Sure, even the first versions of Windows had games preinstalled, but those were first-party instead of third-party, they ostensibly existed to help users learn how to use a mouse, and they didn't plaster themselves front-and-center on my Start menu like seedy massage parlors in a Bangkok red light district) Needless to say, "we've been siphoning your data for multiple decades, so you can trust us to keep doing so even though we're actively betraying that trust at this very moment" is cold comfort at best. I would hope that the New™ and Improved™ Microsoft™ would at least have some self-awareness about that. I'm sure your intentions are good and pure. I hope they stay that way. I have no way of knowing whether or not they will, and historical precedent says they probably won't. It shouldn't be surprising that I and plenty of other tech-savvy users would take such claims of trustworthiness with a baseball-sized grain of salt.
- TheIronYuppie 7y ago
  I should have said - "be good actors in relation to how we handle your data." According to the Windows GDPR statement (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/gdpr-it-guidance https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/gdpr-it-gui...), we only collect Windows functional data and Windows diagnostic data, and only if you allow us. If we did more than that, we'd be liable for huge fines/jail! We have never "siphoned your data for multiple decades" - we only collect WHEN and ONLY WHEN you let us. The way that our intentions haven't changes is because we are legally required to tell you if they do!
  - tekknik 7y ago
    You keep saying trust the GDPR, but what about us on the other side of the pond? GDPR gives us zero recourse if you do run afoul.
ionised 7y ago
> I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! I don't believe you have, sorry (Microsoft I mean, not you specifically). I get the impression Microsoft is the same company it always was, only now it's better at convincing the gullible that it is on their side. That Windows 10 update prompt for previous Windows versions were obnoxious and downright deceitful, making the 20+ years old traditional 'close window' X in the corner of the window actually download the update instead of doing what users expect it to do. That's before we even get onto the subject of Windows 10's draconian privacy policies and use of dark patterns all over the OS designed to get people to disable their privacy settings. Of course, even if they don't fall for tricks like coloring the 'privacy customisation options' link during installation a slightly different colour of blue than the background of the window to make it deliberately hard to read, they will still likely have all their privacy options reset and have previously removed crapware like Candy Crush added all over again in a forced update. I'm on a Pro version of Windows 10 and I can't even disable the telemetry and constant phoning home every time I launch an application and or encounter a problem (that I absolutely do not need help with) with something I'm running. I could understand this crap with the Home version. Not on Pro which I fully expected to have a degree of control over like I did with Win7 pro. As a result of all this, Microsoft finally made my shit list after decades of shady behaviour and anti-competitive business practices and I won't be buying or using anything by them going forward. Hell I even started PC gaming on Linux, that's how much I dislike the things Microsoft does.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  I'm a little late to this party, but I couldn't agree more (except that I'm in the fortunate position of making decisions about my businesses, so we can decide not to use Windows 10 at all for much the same reasons). We also don't use VS Code at all, for one simple reason: we tried to determine what the privacy policy actually was, and we couldn't. In particular, there appeared to be wording among the various indirectly linked documents that implied Microsoft might at some point upload our source code without our knowledge or consent, with no guarantees and nothing to indicate how it would or might then be used. Combine that with an organisation that has a recent deliberate strategy of pushing updates whether wanted or not, collecting data whether volunteered or not, and attempting to coerce or deceive users into accepting those things whether it's in their interest to do so or not, and unfortunately while certain people who work for Microsoft and comment here may have no ill intent, it simply isn't safe to trust the company as a whole with the same benefit of the doubt.

pm90 7y ago

@ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but: * a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and * the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age The incentives today are very very well aligned for a corporation to sell user data. Even if a company may mostly be made of good people, without explicitly written contracts or declarations of any kind, a Company can change internal policies rather quickly. Maybe there will be a manager who sees the selling of that data as a way to boost profit and rise within the company. Maybe the company sells that division along with their data.

kohtatsu 7y ago
s/gold/oil/
ionised 7y ago
You say the issue is not insincerity but I beg to differ. Microsoft has never been particularly sincere about the reasons it does the things it does. It has been a deceitful bully of a company for a long time. Indeed, one of the main reasons why there is so little trust in corporations is because they are so insincere, anti-consumer and lacking in any kind of social conscience.
- TheIronYuppie 7y ago
  I get it - I do. I'm a recent returnee to MSFT, after many years working not at MSFT, and I remember what it was like. We can't rewind and fix the past, but we absolutely can be better working forward, and we will.
TheIronYuppie 7y ago
I totally get it. We're a big company, and you're right to question EVERYTHING. All I can say is we'll try and earn your trust every day and laws like GDPR make sure that we're on the hook to do so. Put another way - we CANNOT change this without EXPLICITLY notifying you.

yellowapple 7y ago

> We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Not sure about the Azure team (since my experience with Azure is limited to a one-off project that required a SQL Server instance to test compatibility with some client's legacy DB, plus some very recent dabbling in VS Code and Azure Data Studio), but whichever team runs Windows nowadays, for example, hasn't exactly "shown [them]selves to be good actors". Or is preinstalling Candy Crush even on "Professional" versions of Windows 10 considered being a "good actor" by today's standards? (Sure, even the first versions of Windows had games preinstalled, but those were first-party instead of third-party, they ostensibly existed to help users learn how to use a mouse, and they didn't plaster themselves front-and-center on my Start menu like seedy massage parlors in a Bangkok red light district) Needless to say, "we've been siphoning your data for multiple decades, so you can trust us to keep doing so even though we're actively betraying that trust at this very moment" is cold comfort at best. I would hope that the New™ and Improved™ Microsoft™ would at least have some self-awareness about that. I'm sure your intentions are good and pure. I hope they stay that way. I have no way of knowing whether or not they will, and historical precedent says they probably won't. It shouldn't be surprising that I and plenty of other tech-savvy users would take such claims of trustworthiness with a baseball-sized grain of salt.

TheIronYuppie 7y ago
I should have said - "be good actors in relation to how we handle your data." According to the Windows GDPR statement (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/gdpr-it-guidance https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/gdpr-it-gui...), we only collect Windows functional data and Windows diagnostic data, and only if you allow us. If we did more than that, we'd be liable for huge fines/jail! We have never "siphoned your data for multiple decades" - we only collect WHEN and ONLY WHEN you let us. The way that our intentions haven't changes is because we are legally required to tell you if they do!
- tekknik 7y ago
  You keep saying trust the GDPR, but what about us on the other side of the pond? GDPR gives us zero recourse if you do run afoul.

ionised 7y ago

> I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! I don't believe you have, sorry (Microsoft I mean, not you specifically). I get the impression Microsoft is the same company it always was, only now it's better at convincing the gullible that it is on their side. That Windows 10 update prompt for previous Windows versions were obnoxious and downright deceitful, making the 20+ years old traditional 'close window' X in the corner of the window actually download the update instead of doing what users expect it to do. That's before we even get onto the subject of Windows 10's draconian privacy policies and use of dark patterns all over the OS designed to get people to disable their privacy settings. Of course, even if they don't fall for tricks like coloring the 'privacy customisation options' link during installation a slightly different colour of blue than the background of the window to make it deliberately hard to read, they will still likely have all their privacy options reset and have previously removed crapware like Candy Crush added all over again in a forced update. I'm on a Pro version of Windows 10 and I can't even disable the telemetry and constant phoning home every time I launch an application and or encounter a problem (that I absolutely do not need help with) with something I'm running. I could understand this crap with the Home version. Not on Pro which I fully expected to have a degree of control over like I did with Win7 pro. As a result of all this, Microsoft finally made my shit list after decades of shady behaviour and anti-competitive business practices and I won't be buying or using anything by them going forward. Hell I even started PC gaming on Linux, that's how much I dislike the things Microsoft does.

Silhouette 7y ago
I'm a little late to this party, but I couldn't agree more (except that I'm in the fortunate position of making decisions about my businesses, so we can decide not to use Windows 10 at all for much the same reasons). We also don't use VS Code at all, for one simple reason: we tried to determine what the privacy policy actually was, and we couldn't. In particular, there appeared to be wording among the various indirectly linked documents that implied Microsoft might at some point upload our source code without our knowledge or consent, with no guarantees and nothing to indicate how it would or might then be used. Combine that with an organisation that has a recent deliberate strategy of pushing updates whether wanted or not, collecting data whether volunteered or not, and attempting to coerce or deceive users into accepting those things whether it's in their interest to do so or not, and unfortunately while certain people who work for Microsoft and comment here may have no ill intent, it simply isn't safe to trust the company as a whole with the same benefit of the doubt.