26 ms·

Report on Microsoft Office and Windows software: still privacy risks remaining

318 points by GordonS 7y ago

Someone1234 7y ago
This is fantastic. Not only have they effectively pushed Microsoft to improve things for everyone (in 1905 of Office and 1903 of Windows specifically, via new [lower] telemetry options), but now Data Viewer supports Microsoft Office's telemetry, and we have more data on what Office's telemetry is doing. Overall well done PrivacyCompany and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a positive direction.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  Surely non-US governments should just reject software with intrusive telemetry?
  - jszymborski 7y ago
    Many european gov'ts have been ditching MS Office for LibreOffice, and in some rarer cases Windows for Linux. Italy https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/italian-army-switches-libreoffice https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/italian-army-switches-l... UK https://archive.fo/l5n9Z https://archive.fo/l5n9Z France https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/french-gendarmerie-open-sou https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...
    - vanderZwan 7y ago
      I wonder how much these development may have motivated the recent change in attitude towards open source and Linux at Microsoft. I mean even if it had they'd never publicly acknowledge that, since it would be seen as a sign of weakness (and give more free press to the competition in a way)
      - gnode 7y ago
        I think the main reason Microsoft has become more Linux friendly is that it is crucial to the success of Azure, which has become a major part of Microsoft's business.
    - danieldk 7y ago
      the army aims to replace all MS Office installations by the end of the year. Seeing is believing. This has often been used as a strategy to get license discounts from Microsoft.
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        License discounts have been Microsofts strategy to persuade organizations to stay.
  - gnode 7y ago
    For a variety of reasons, many of them are in the unfortunate and short-sighted position of being married to Windows and Microsoft software. Rejecting the software outright, and adopting some alternative would likely present larger costs and disruption. That said, there are a few cases in which the calculus favours this, or FOSS ideology prevails.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Since their training, workflow, and existing data/applications centers around Windows and Office and they are a comparatively big customer, it is probably easier/cheaper for them to strong arm Microsoft into compliance than moving to an alternative operating system and office suite. The interesting take-away from the article and the linked article is that in part they used the GDPR and Dutch privacy laws to force Microsoft into compliance: The processing of diagnostic data for so many broad and undefined purposes is contrary to the principle of purpose limitation. Additionally, in most cases, there is no legal basis for processing the diagnostic data for these purposes. As (sole or joint) controller, Microsoft cannot rely on the consent of employees as referred to in the GDPR because of the dependent position of employees. At the same time, consent is required under Section 11.7a of the Dutch Telecommunications Act for retrieving data via the Internet, through built-in software, if such processing is not strictly necessary. Which means that the GDPR does have teeth, which is good for everyone in the EU, not just governments or larger organizations. Similarly, the EU court of justice has recently decided based on the GDPR that web sites must ask consent for sending personal data by loading Facebook like buttons: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-dataprotection/companies-using-facebook-like-button-liable-for-data-eu-court-idUSKCN1UO1B4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-dataprotectio...
- spinningslate 7y ago
  Agree it's great that the Dutch Government is pushing Microsoft to be more transparent. > Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a positive direction. Indeed. From the article: "The Dutch government’s new privacy terms and conditions do not (yet) apply to data processing via Windows 10 Enterprise or the mobile Office apps. It is not possible to minimize data traffic in Office Online. From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. This is done without providing any information about the purposes of this processing, and without giving the users or administrators any possibility to prevent this processing." So: use Office on iOS, and it'll send usage data off to some predictive profiling marketing firm. Why, as a (presumably) paying user, is it OK for Microsoft to do that?
  - eitland 7y ago
    > From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. @Microsoft folks here: This, if true (edit: in the way presented here) is outright disgusting. I have lately found myself defending you when people have been complaining about telemetry (I'm a developer myself so I can see the value), but selling (or giving away) data from Office apps to profiling companies is not ok. I honestly believed that your upside of such deals was the ability to easily upsell me to a paid version of this software. This, again if it is correct, is disgusting and might easily be a huge GDPR issue despite how many cookie warnings anyone adds.
    - danieldk 7y ago
      This, again if it is correct, is disgusting and might easily be a huge GDPR issue despite how many cookie warnings anyone adds. Indeed, remember that warnings here a not enough to comply with the GDPR. IANAL, but GDPR requires opt-in rather than opt out, there should be a clear choice, permission should be asked for specific purposes. Also, it should be possible to withdraw permissions, one should be able to retrieve all the stored data, and the data has to be removed on request.
- hendersoon 7y ago
  Unfortunately the Windows telemetry options only apply to Enterprise and Education versions. If you run Windows Home or Pro, Microsoft does not permit you to disable telemetry via any supported mechanism. You need to use a third-party tool to do it. I recommend Shutup10.
  - endemic 7y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. I’m grudgingly considering a Win10 install for gaming, and the mandatory telemetry is a hard pill to swallow.
starsinspace 7y ago
Microsoft is really shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible approach to privacy ever since Win10. Given that they earn money by selling actual products, they could stand right next to Apple as a defender of privacy if they wanted to (unlike Google, which has a business model which depends on data collection)... but they choose not to. It's not so long ago, in 2011, they had this video, targeting Google's privacy problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0 Now they're no better than Google. What happened?
- danieldk 7y ago
  Indeed, this is surprising for many reasons: - B2B is a large part of their income, telemetry has probably damaged their reputation as a business vendor. - They have mostly failed at social media (except LinkedIn and Skype, which they have bought). So, there is no strong need for them to collect all this data to profit off (otherwise free) social media. - They have a strong developer story with WSL, Azure, etc. They could have replaced Apple as the darling of developers. But not with telemetry, start menu ads, etc. - At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could take on Google's weaknesses.
  - snazz 7y ago
    And it’s hard to see any benefits of them collecting all this data. If I remember correctly, there was a rumor that their telemetry told them that nobody used the Start Menu, leading to the Windows 8 debacle! Have they pushed any new features lately that have been directly attributed to data collection?
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Almost everything? Insider Blogs continue to make it pretty clear that in the Windows 10 "Windows as a Service" world, almost everything is subject to telemetry based development/focus/resourcing. Insider Builds themselves often have A/B testing experiments in play. Even things like the giant Console rewrite and WSL apparently owe just as much to telemetry meriting their resources as the (return) of Azure and DevDiv's "developer-first focus" to Windows (after all these years). (A fun irony of the "Start Menu debacle" to which you refer was more of a sample size problem than a telemetry problem. With Windows Vista-8 keeping telemetry primarily opt-in, they mostly only had interesting subsets of newbie/casual users that clicked yes during setup and power users with vested telemetry interests. Newbie/casual users tend to launch apps "Search only" or "Desktop only" keeping all their shortcuts on the desktop. Power Users tend to use alternate launchers or become increasingly "Search only" over time, especially if you count Win+R old timers, which Windows did. Microsoft had a good argument that trying to make the telemetry opt-out would avoid such biased sample sets going forward.)
anticensor 7y ago
There are really only two levels of Windows telemetry according to this report's endpoint analysis: -Minimum (Security) -Full The report goes into lengthy detail explaining the default level is Full: « The IT-pro’s (administrators) of the Enterprise version can choose between three telemetry options (Security, Basic or Full). If the administrator chooses to suppress the privacy-related set-up experience and does not adjust the setting otherwise (e.g., by group policy), the default diagnostic data level setting is Enhanced. 51 At that level, Microsoft explains it collects “Additional insights, including: how Windows, Windows Server, System Center, and apps are used, how they perform, advanced reliability data, and data from both the Basic and the Security levels.” 52 . In that case, the setting for diagnostic data presented to end-users is set to Full »
driverdan 7y ago
> From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. Can any MS employees jump in and justify how you find this acceptable?
- swebs 7y ago
  What are you gonna do about it? Switch to Libre Office? Mwuhahahaha
  - type0 7y ago
    What are you gonna do? Switch to reddit? Mwuhahahaha
- bradford 7y ago
  MS employee here (I work with data but not in Office). My opinion: I don't find this acceptable. At the end of the day, sending data to a third party without the customers awareness is a violation of trust, regardless of how narrow in scope that data might be. I'm curious to see how MS responds. There are several unanswered questions that I'd like answered. Specifically: 1. Any disputes about the factual nature of these claims? 2. If not, what is the third party doing with the data?
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    I wish we had more honest opinions like this on HN, from tech workers about their own company's flaws.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Can you explain how this is different / worse than an app having Google analytics embedded? If that's unacceptable then the same goes for 90% of apps, not just those by Microsoft.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    To follow up on this, for anyone who might have seen it, a scan of the Word app for Android indicates that it contains * Google Firebase Analytics * HockeyApp The former I've seen in about 90% of apps I've downloaded from the Google Play Store. The latter claims to be "the best way to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage." Oh, and Microsoft owns it. [1] Neither seems particularly unusual to me. I wonder what has caused this much outrage: * Assumptions about the nature of the "tracking" ("specializes in predictive profiling" leaves a lot to the imagination) * Assuming that other apps aren't doing the same thing * A general expression of anger at all apps that have embedded scripts like these [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/microsoft-acquires-hockeyapp/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/microsoft-acquires-hoc...
kerng 7y ago
Microsoft is all about telemetry to improve its products, and it's a slippery slope and some of the instances pointed out here are way beyond what one would consider useful (for feature developmemt) telemetry. This might cost Microsoft a few billion.
- nfoz 7y ago
  The stated purpose of telemetry is to improve their products. Yet the telemetry itself is a massive problem in their products. Does anyone know what, if any, product improvements have been made thanks to telemetry?
  - suby 7y ago
    Microsoft gave two examples where telemetry helped them in an Arstechnica article a while back. One was fixing a bug in their alarm clock app, the other was fixing an audio driver issue. If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of-what-data-it-collects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro... "As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. The Alarm app can have more complicated interactions than one might think, due to its interactions with system sleep (it can wake a machine up if necessary) and the notification framework. Some Windows users reported that their alarms weren't consistently going off. As is often the case with annoying bugs, the problem was intermittent, appearing to occur randomly and hence difficult to reproduce for debugging. With information collected at the Full level from a broad range of affected machines, the company's developers were able to ascertain the precise combination of factors leading to problems, and discovered that alarms became more unreliable as they grew older. The bug was fixed, and a patch was deployed. Another problem the company described to us was that certain combinations of audio drivers and audio hardware were resulting in audio that was broken or missing certain special effects. The telemetry data enabled the exact pairings of drivers and hardware that had issues to be pinpointed, enabling a fix to be developed."
    - 7y ago
speeder 7y ago
Awesome, maybe will give data so I can more easily defend my position to refuse Win10 (I was on Win8, hoping Win10 would be better... instead telemetry and forced updates that break everything fairly regularly made me instead uninstall Win8 and install Win7 instead) or convince me Win10 telemetry really, really is fine. Mind you, where I live, political assassinations, industrial espionage and assassinations and whatnot, although rare, DO exist, so privacy is important (specially for me since I AM actually registered officially as a politician although I never won any election)
- frickinLasers 7y ago
  I sure hope you're keeping on top of all the Win7 telemetry updates, then. https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-7-updates-list-descriptions-telemetry.html https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-... https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry-windows-7/ https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry-win...
  - speeder 7y ago
    I disabled auto-updating precisely so I can only accept certain updates and not others...
  - mkup 7y ago
    What's the point of collecting telemetry in Windows 7, if there will be no future versions of Windows 7 (this OS is near its EOL)?
    - frickinLasers 7y ago
      That's a good question... /tinfoilhat
- burk96 7y ago
  Honestly, unless you absolutely need Windows for critical programs/drivers, I would look into switching to Linux. While there are super hardened distros such as Qubes, even something more user friendly such as Debian and Fedora would be much more trustworthy than Windows 7. Ubuntu would likely be a good place to start if you are completely new as well. They've had their scandals, and the kernel is very large and much harder to audit than the other two, but I would still feel better using it than Windows 7 privacy wise.
squarefoot 7y ago
The article mentions 12 bullet points for the most important measures organizations should take to mitigate the problem; some seem trivial, others surely are more complicated requiring time and money (this ain't Joe User's home gaming PC) and would offer no guarantee of achieving the goal because it's still closed software. So why not pouring that same amount of money into a single entity whose only purpose would be to integrate, or create where necessary, then document and support, FOSS software that does essentially the same things and services? (ie, not just Linux+Libreoffice). I would surely donate some quid myself but I'm also 100% sure a lot of big names would follow making the thing self sustainable, as I'm not the only one feeling uncomfortable by knowing that my personal data is managed by companies that profit from people personal data (therefore including Google and others). This problem hits everyone: I may choose not to use any of their software on my machines, but I have no chances of convincing either my doctor or my lawyer to do the same, unless the practice becomes widespread and non technical users too are made aware of the issues.
contravariant 7y ago
>Upgrade to version 1905 or higher of Office 365 ProPlus and set the telemetry level to the 'Neither' option. Well that's a dark pattern if I've ever seen one. Worse it suggests that before version 1905 there were only two options for telemetry, and neither of them was no telemetry.
- pndy 7y ago
  A "funny" thing: in Vista and 7 the modal window for Improvement Program had a "Yes, I want to participate in the program." option set as default and you had to press bottom option twice so the save button would reactivate from grayed out state and you could refuse the participation. This little thing worked in such manner each time no matter of the build (original or with service pack), showing up to few hours after setting up fresh Windows installation and I'd say it was aimed at ordinary user who wouldn't try clicking twice on the option to see if it could be changed. There was this report posted last year [1] where Norwegian Consumer Council was reviewing dark patterns used at facebook, Google and Windows. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186

318 points by GordonS 7y ago

This is fantastic. Not only have they effectively pushed Microsoft to improve things for everyone (in 1905 of Office and 1903 of Windows specifically, via new [lower] telemetry options), but now Data Viewer supports Microsoft Office's telemetry, and we have more data on what Office's telemetry is doing. Overall well done PrivacyCompany and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a positive direction.

hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
Surely non-US governments should just reject software with intrusive telemetry?
- jszymborski 7y ago
  Many european gov'ts have been ditching MS Office for LibreOffice, and in some rarer cases Windows for Linux. Italy https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/italian-army-switches-libreoffice https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/italian-army-switches-l... UK https://archive.fo/l5n9Z https://archive.fo/l5n9Z France https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/french-gendarmerie-open-sou https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    I wonder how much these development may have motivated the recent change in attitude towards open source and Linux at Microsoft. I mean even if it had they'd never publicly acknowledge that, since it would be seen as a sign of weakness (and give more free press to the competition in a way)
    - gnode 7y ago
      I think the main reason Microsoft has become more Linux friendly is that it is crucial to the success of Azure, which has become a major part of Microsoft's business.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    the army aims to replace all MS Office installations by the end of the year. Seeing is believing. This has often been used as a strategy to get license discounts from Microsoft.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      License discounts have been Microsofts strategy to persuade organizations to stay.
- gnode 7y ago
  For a variety of reasons, many of them are in the unfortunate and short-sighted position of being married to Windows and Microsoft software. Rejecting the software outright, and adopting some alternative would likely present larger costs and disruption. That said, there are a few cases in which the calculus favours this, or FOSS ideology prevails.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Since their training, workflow, and existing data/applications centers around Windows and Office and they are a comparatively big customer, it is probably easier/cheaper for them to strong arm Microsoft into compliance than moving to an alternative operating system and office suite. The interesting take-away from the article and the linked article is that in part they used the GDPR and Dutch privacy laws to force Microsoft into compliance: The processing of diagnostic data for so many broad and undefined purposes is contrary to the principle of purpose limitation. Additionally, in most cases, there is no legal basis for processing the diagnostic data for these purposes. As (sole or joint) controller, Microsoft cannot rely on the consent of employees as referred to in the GDPR because of the dependent position of employees. At the same time, consent is required under Section 11.7a of the Dutch Telecommunications Act for retrieving data via the Internet, through built-in software, if such processing is not strictly necessary. Which means that the GDPR does have teeth, which is good for everyone in the EU, not just governments or larger organizations. Similarly, the EU court of justice has recently decided based on the GDPR that web sites must ask consent for sending personal data by loading Facebook like buttons: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-dataprotection/companies-using-facebook-like-button-liable-for-data-eu-court-idUSKCN1UO1B4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-dataprotectio...
spinningslate 7y ago
Agree it's great that the Dutch Government is pushing Microsoft to be more transparent. > Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a positive direction. Indeed. From the article: "The Dutch government’s new privacy terms and conditions do not (yet) apply to data processing via Windows 10 Enterprise or the mobile Office apps. It is not possible to minimize data traffic in Office Online. From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. This is done without providing any information about the purposes of this processing, and without giving the users or administrators any possibility to prevent this processing." So: use Office on iOS, and it'll send usage data off to some predictive profiling marketing firm. Why, as a (presumably) paying user, is it OK for Microsoft to do that?
- eitland 7y ago
  > From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. @Microsoft folks here: This, if true (edit: in the way presented here) is outright disgusting. I have lately found myself defending you when people have been complaining about telemetry (I'm a developer myself so I can see the value), but selling (or giving away) data from Office apps to profiling companies is not ok. I honestly believed that your upside of such deals was the ability to easily upsell me to a paid version of this software. This, again if it is correct, is disgusting and might easily be a huge GDPR issue despite how many cookie warnings anyone adds.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    This, again if it is correct, is disgusting and might easily be a huge GDPR issue despite how many cookie warnings anyone adds. Indeed, remember that warnings here a not enough to comply with the GDPR. IANAL, but GDPR requires opt-in rather than opt out, there should be a clear choice, permission should be asked for specific purposes. Also, it should be possible to withdraw permissions, one should be able to retrieve all the stored data, and the data has to be removed on request.
hendersoon 7y ago
Unfortunately the Windows telemetry options only apply to Enterprise and Education versions. If you run Windows Home or Pro, Microsoft does not permit you to disable telemetry via any supported mechanism. You need to use a third-party tool to do it. I recommend Shutup10.
- endemic 7y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. I’m grudgingly considering a Win10 install for gaming, and the mandatory telemetry is a hard pill to swallow.

starsinspace 7y ago

Microsoft is really shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible approach to privacy ever since Win10. Given that they earn money by selling actual products, they could stand right next to Apple as a defender of privacy if they wanted to (unlike Google, which has a business model which depends on data collection)... but they choose not to. It's not so long ago, in 2011, they had this video, targeting Google's privacy problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0 Now they're no better than Google. What happened?

danieldk 7y ago
Indeed, this is surprising for many reasons: - B2B is a large part of their income, telemetry has probably damaged their reputation as a business vendor. - They have mostly failed at social media (except LinkedIn and Skype, which they have bought). So, there is no strong need for them to collect all this data to profit off (otherwise free) social media. - They have a strong developer story with WSL, Azure, etc. They could have replaced Apple as the darling of developers. But not with telemetry, start menu ads, etc. - At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could take on Google's weaknesses.
- snazz 7y ago
  And it’s hard to see any benefits of them collecting all this data. If I remember correctly, there was a rumor that their telemetry told them that nobody used the Start Menu, leading to the Windows 8 debacle! Have they pushed any new features lately that have been directly attributed to data collection?
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Almost everything? Insider Blogs continue to make it pretty clear that in the Windows 10 "Windows as a Service" world, almost everything is subject to telemetry based development/focus/resourcing. Insider Builds themselves often have A/B testing experiments in play. Even things like the giant Console rewrite and WSL apparently owe just as much to telemetry meriting their resources as the (return) of Azure and DevDiv's "developer-first focus" to Windows (after all these years). (A fun irony of the "Start Menu debacle" to which you refer was more of a sample size problem than a telemetry problem. With Windows Vista-8 keeping telemetry primarily opt-in, they mostly only had interesting subsets of newbie/casual users that clicked yes during setup and power users with vested telemetry interests. Newbie/casual users tend to launch apps "Search only" or "Desktop only" keeping all their shortcuts on the desktop. Power Users tend to use alternate launchers or become increasingly "Search only" over time, especially if you count Win+R old timers, which Windows did. Microsoft had a good argument that trying to make the telemetry opt-out would avoid such biased sample sets going forward.)

anticensor 7y ago

There are really only two levels of Windows telemetry according to this report's endpoint analysis: -Minimum (Security) -Full The report goes into lengthy detail explaining the default level is Full: « The IT-pro’s (administrators) of the Enterprise version can choose between three telemetry options (Security, Basic or Full). If the administrator chooses to suppress the privacy-related set-up experience and does not adjust the setting otherwise (e.g., by group policy), the default diagnostic data level setting is Enhanced. 51 At that level, Microsoft explains it collects “Additional insights, including: how Windows, Windows Server, System Center, and apps are used, how they perform, advanced reliability data, and data from both the Basic and the Security levels.” 52 . In that case, the setting for diagnostic data presented to end-users is set to Full »

driverdan 7y ago

> From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. Can any MS employees jump in and justify how you find this acceptable?

swebs 7y ago
What are you gonna do about it? Switch to Libre Office? Mwuhahahaha
- type0 7y ago
  What are you gonna do? Switch to reddit? Mwuhahahaha
bradford 7y ago
MS employee here (I work with data but not in Office). My opinion: I don't find this acceptable. At the end of the day, sending data to a third party without the customers awareness is a violation of trust, regardless of how narrow in scope that data might be. I'm curious to see how MS responds. There are several unanswered questions that I'd like answered. Specifically: 1. Any disputes about the factual nature of these claims? 2. If not, what is the third party doing with the data?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I wish we had more honest opinions like this on HN, from tech workers about their own company's flaws.
bscphil 7y ago
Can you explain how this is different / worse than an app having Google analytics embedded? If that's unacceptable then the same goes for 90% of apps, not just those by Microsoft.
- bscphil 7y ago
  To follow up on this, for anyone who might have seen it, a scan of the Word app for Android indicates that it contains * Google Firebase Analytics * HockeyApp The former I've seen in about 90% of apps I've downloaded from the Google Play Store. The latter claims to be "the best way to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage." Oh, and Microsoft owns it. [1] Neither seems particularly unusual to me. I wonder what has caused this much outrage: * Assumptions about the nature of the "tracking" ("specializes in predictive profiling" leaves a lot to the imagination) * Assuming that other apps aren't doing the same thing * A general expression of anger at all apps that have embedded scripts like these [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/microsoft-acquires-hockeyapp/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/microsoft-acquires-hoc...

kerng 7y ago

Microsoft is all about telemetry to improve its products, and it's a slippery slope and some of the instances pointed out here are way beyond what one would consider useful (for feature developmemt) telemetry. This might cost Microsoft a few billion.

nfoz 7y ago
The stated purpose of telemetry is to improve their products. Yet the telemetry itself is a massive problem in their products. Does anyone know what, if any, product improvements have been made thanks to telemetry?
- suby 7y ago
  Microsoft gave two examples where telemetry helped them in an Arstechnica article a while back. One was fixing a bug in their alarm clock app, the other was fixing an audio driver issue. If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of-what-data-it-collects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro... "As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. The Alarm app can have more complicated interactions than one might think, due to its interactions with system sleep (it can wake a machine up if necessary) and the notification framework. Some Windows users reported that their alarms weren't consistently going off. As is often the case with annoying bugs, the problem was intermittent, appearing to occur randomly and hence difficult to reproduce for debugging. With information collected at the Full level from a broad range of affected machines, the company's developers were able to ascertain the precise combination of factors leading to problems, and discovered that alarms became more unreliable as they grew older. The bug was fixed, and a patch was deployed. Another problem the company described to us was that certain combinations of audio drivers and audio hardware were resulting in audio that was broken or missing certain special effects. The telemetry data enabled the exact pairings of drivers and hardware that had issues to be pinpointed, enabling a fix to be developed."
  - 7y ago

speeder 7y ago

Awesome, maybe will give data so I can more easily defend my position to refuse Win10 (I was on Win8, hoping Win10 would be better... instead telemetry and forced updates that break everything fairly regularly made me instead uninstall Win8 and install Win7 instead) or convince me Win10 telemetry really, really is fine. Mind you, where I live, political assassinations, industrial espionage and assassinations and whatnot, although rare, DO exist, so privacy is important (specially for me since I AM actually registered officially as a politician although I never won any election)

frickinLasers 7y ago
I sure hope you're keeping on top of all the Win7 telemetry updates, then. https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-7-updates-list-descriptions-telemetry.html https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-... https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry-windows-7/ https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry-win...
- speeder 7y ago
  I disabled auto-updating precisely so I can only accept certain updates and not others...
- mkup 7y ago
  What's the point of collecting telemetry in Windows 7, if there will be no future versions of Windows 7 (this OS is near its EOL)?
  - frickinLasers 7y ago
    That's a good question... /tinfoilhat
burk96 7y ago
Honestly, unless you absolutely need Windows for critical programs/drivers, I would look into switching to Linux. While there are super hardened distros such as Qubes, even something more user friendly such as Debian and Fedora would be much more trustworthy than Windows 7. Ubuntu would likely be a good place to start if you are completely new as well. They've had their scandals, and the kernel is very large and much harder to audit than the other two, but I would still feel better using it than Windows 7 privacy wise.

squarefoot 7y ago

The article mentions 12 bullet points for the most important measures organizations should take to mitigate the problem; some seem trivial, others surely are more complicated requiring time and money (this ain't Joe User's home gaming PC) and would offer no guarantee of achieving the goal because it's still closed software. So why not pouring that same amount of money into a single entity whose only purpose would be to integrate, or create where necessary, then document and support, FOSS software that does essentially the same things and services? (ie, not just Linux+Libreoffice). I would surely donate some quid myself but I'm also 100% sure a lot of big names would follow making the thing self sustainable, as I'm not the only one feeling uncomfortable by knowing that my personal data is managed by companies that profit from people personal data (therefore including Google and others). This problem hits everyone: I may choose not to use any of their software on my machines, but I have no chances of convincing either my doctor or my lawyer to do the same, unless the practice becomes widespread and non technical users too are made aware of the issues.

contravariant 7y ago

>Upgrade to version 1905 or higher of Office 365 ProPlus and set the telemetry level to the 'Neither' option. Well that's a dark pattern if I've ever seen one. Worse it suggests that before version 1905 there were only two options for telemetry, and neither of them was no telemetry.

pndy 7y ago
A "funny" thing: in Vista and 7 the modal window for Improvement Program had a "Yes, I want to participate in the program." option set as default and you had to press bottom option twice so the save button would reactivate from grayed out state and you could refuse the participation. This little thing worked in such manner each time no matter of the build (original or with service pack), showing up to few hours after setting up fresh Windows installation and I'd say it was aimed at ordinary user who wouldn't try clicking twice on the option to see if it could be changed. There was this report posted last year [1] where Norwegian Consumer Council was reviewing dark patterns used at facebook, Google and Windows. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186