9 ms·

While this is indeed worrisome, I’m not really sure Microsoft is any better than Amazon from a pure end-user point of view. Microsoft has been a telemetry cham

While this is indeed worrisome, I’m not really sure Microsoft is any better than Amazon from a pure end-user point of view. Microsoft has been a telemetry champion and has been collecting troves of personal data through Windows 10, all the while making it almost impossible for the average user to disable it (and re-enabling it with every major update). So if Microsoft goes the same route as Amazon (resigning every app), it’s just a matter of choice between a rock and a hard place. On the other hand, even if they allow for the app developer to keep its signature, Microsoft is still probably very capable of gathering data and telemetry through their Android implementation. Either way, and until it becomes illegal to collect data without explicit consent, I’m pretty sure we’re screwed…

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
The telemetry for Windows is a frequent topic here, could anyone clarify/compare the story for Mac OS?
- umanwizard 5y ago
  In the Apple ecosystem you are asked once when setting up a new device if you would like to enable telemetry.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Apple devices still phone home constantly with things that amount to telemetry when you use them, even with analytics disabled. Opening the App Store app, for example, sends your hardware serial number. Macs and iOS both maintain hardware-serial-linked 24/7 connections to Apple's push servers, too. There aren't opt out UI settings available for the majority of Apple's phone-home.
  - tgragnato 5y ago
    The situation is a little better compared to Windows, but it's not perfect. I always disable telemetry, but iphonesubmissions.apple.com:443, radarsubmissions.apple.com:443 and securemetrics.apple.com:443 are still contacted. People messing with ocsp.apple.com:80 (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1460 https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1460) also need to be aware of ocsp2.apple.com:443. The iAdSDK setting is somewhat respected, but all the Siri subdomains are pinged even if Siri is turned off.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I’ve never had to try and remove ads from macOS to the extent that I do with windows 10, it’s not devoid of advertising but not quite as bad
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    Moving the goalposts. The parent was asking about telemetry specifically.
  - nightski 5y ago
    You get ads on Windows 10? I've never seen a third party ad. They have had an ad for Office which was a live tile (which I have disabled because I do not find them useful.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      Also not me, but American friends have always complained about this so I presume that they don't want to anger some regulators in countries where they don't put ads.
      - skydhash 5y ago
        They were in the start menu. Ads for software and games. There was that candy crush saga game for ages.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        Indeed even here in Europe. Cleaning the start menu from all that crap is the first thing I always do. I empty out the entire right hand side, because if you do so it actually disappears! But many updates put things back there.
  - slg 5y ago
    Ads are telemetry now? Is "telemetry" just a catch all for "anything software does that I don't like"?
jjcon 5y ago
This is why I treat windows as my gaming console at this point. I game on it, thats it. Everything important I leave to linux/mac.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Wine/Proton is so good that you might find you don't even need it for that.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    Games consistently get fewer FPS on my setup. 3750H GTX1650. Part of it is nvidia drivers being poopoo, most of it being CPU cycles overhead.
    - skohan 5y ago
      In my experience the nvidia drivers have been getting much better recently. Proton's not perfect, but it's been mostly worth it for me not to have to boot windows.
      - Bancakes 5y ago
        Agreed. For anyone interested in FPS boost, try glorious eggroll proton. I personally compile it myself off the AUR with the -O3 -march=native flags (look at the PKGBUILD for more details), and I get fewer FPS than Windows, yet more consistently than Wine. No microstuttering.
      - mvolfik 5y ago
        My experience is that even running Among Us (i.e. a very simple game) via Steam/Proton on Ubuntu LTS (i.e. the most common platform) was quite fiddly. Didn't have chance to try much else, Factorio is luckily native
  - jjcon 5y ago
    For most things absolutely- I’ve had great success with proton. There are a few holdouts, especially in the VR space where Windows is still unfortunately very necessary.
judge2020 5y ago
> and has been collecting troves of personal data through Windows 10 How much PII is really collected via W10 telemetry? Or is the amount of times you click the start menu, accidentally search for something via Bing, then close that window now considered personal information?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if it's PII or not. You ask before collecting. That's basic decency. Not your computer. Not your data.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Not your computer. Not your data. Unfortunately, Microsoft thinks otherwise. See the huge discussion here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629350 (tl;dr: thanks to Secure Boot, Microsoft had to give permission for Linux to boot.) Also, don't forget the whole "Windows as a service" crap.
- varispeed 5y ago
  Your behaviour is personal to you and it is possible to identify a person based on that data.
- shostack 5y ago
  For me it's a question if whether it is ever linked or able to be linked to specific app usage or details of that usage (thing Edge browsing behavior). With industry privacy changes, having a persistent login at the OS level let's you do an end run around privacy protections in a browser, or incognito mode type stuff potentially.
nightski 5y ago
I've been using Windows 10 since it's initial release and have never had telemetry automatically re enabled. I check the relevant settings regularly (every few months). I have no idea what all people on HN are doing that causes this to happen so frequently to them but it's never been a real problem. I wish I knew what I was doing differently so I could make a blog post about it haha.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  I mean, what the HN and tech in general (edit: not general - sorry) audience wants is a totally zero telemetry, even if said telemetry is literally the list of installed updates. I personally think that's genuinely weird to me, since that Microsoft's "basic" telemetry only sends critical data like how many times Windows crash (and actually has the data reduced from 2015's state).
  - nightski 5y ago
    Yeah, knowing how much telemetry has helped me improve the user experience in the internal apps I work on I really don't think it is that evil. I think people just wish it was easier to enable/disable and that Microsoft was more transparent about it.
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      I think that the possibility of abuse (which has happened), possibility of government requesting that data (also happened, plus people here tends to be not inclined to give their data to any government), and possibility of leakage (general leakage not happened with Microsoft, but there's state-level hacks) means that even telemetry is tainted with privacy issues.
    - skohan 5y ago
      As someone who has worked on user-facing software, the part which bothers me the most is the reversal of user settings. MS is really bad about this, and even broke a linux install on a separate partition on my machine by changing the UEFI settings after an update without asking me. If I shipped software which did this, I would feel like I had to turn in my developer card.
skohan 5y ago
I sometimes wonder how profitable it actually is for Microsoft to be so pushy on data. What I mean is: I understand that MS is quite zealous internally about telemetry, but how effective is this data in terms of actually improving their profitability? From the user side, I am quite sure it is hurting the experience. One example is logins. MS is pretty bad about requiring logins for products which don't really require it in order to complete the user journey - for instance I bought the Halo collection on Steam, and in order to play an offline, single-player game I have to log into an MS account. As a result I haven't played the game in months, because I have to use this MS account that I don't even want to have, and I can't be bothered to reset the password for when there are other games I can play which just start up with no arbitrary hoop to jump through. And what does MS actually get out of it? I guess they can optimize their dark UI patterns to be better at tricking people into setting Edge as their default browser? Being data driven is good, but it seems to me it's not working if the end result is compromising the core user experience.
- freeone3000 5y ago
  User telemetry replaces what were once focus groups and market research. Without telemetry, Microsoft would be unable to determine what products were used, what features were used, and unable to determine prioritization for backwards compatibility and bugfixes, because it chose to rely on telemetry for basic business operations.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    User telemetry replaces what were once focus groups and market research. These things still exist, and many companies still use focus groups and market research. The company I work for, for example, does this extensively because I'm in the healthcare space and the legal department doesn't want us collecting information about our users without them really really really knowing its happening. Another example is MailChimp. It not only does video interviews with its users to determine how they use the product, it pays you for your time. Microsoft has the money and staff to do this basic research. "Telemetry" is just a synonym for lazy and cheap.
yyyk 5y ago
Well, if you're using Windows you're stuck with Microsoft anyway. It's preferable not to add Amazon to the mix. I'm not sure how the terms of the integration go, this could be avoidable - and it would be awesome if it was possible to port F-Droid to Windows.

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago

The telemetry for Windows is a frequent topic here, could anyone clarify/compare the story for Mac OS?

umanwizard 5y ago
In the Apple ecosystem you are asked once when setting up a new device if you would like to enable telemetry.
- sneak 5y ago
  Apple devices still phone home constantly with things that amount to telemetry when you use them, even with analytics disabled. Opening the App Store app, for example, sends your hardware serial number. Macs and iOS both maintain hardware-serial-linked 24/7 connections to Apple's push servers, too. There aren't opt out UI settings available for the majority of Apple's phone-home.
- tgragnato 5y ago
  The situation is a little better compared to Windows, but it's not perfect. I always disable telemetry, but iphonesubmissions.apple.com:443, radarsubmissions.apple.com:443 and securemetrics.apple.com:443 are still contacted. People messing with ocsp.apple.com:80 (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1460 https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1460) also need to be aware of ocsp2.apple.com:443. The iAdSDK setting is somewhat respected, but all the Siri subdomains are pinged even if Siri is turned off.
NegativeLatency 5y ago
I’ve never had to try and remove ads from macOS to the extent that I do with windows 10, it’s not devoid of advertising but not quite as bad
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Moving the goalposts. The parent was asking about telemetry specifically.
- nightski 5y ago
  You get ads on Windows 10? I've never seen a third party ad. They have had an ad for Office which was a live tile (which I have disabled because I do not find them useful.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Also not me, but American friends have always complained about this so I presume that they don't want to anger some regulators in countries where they don't put ads.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      They were in the start menu. Ads for software and games. There was that candy crush saga game for ages.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        Indeed even here in Europe. Cleaning the start menu from all that crap is the first thing I always do. I empty out the entire right hand side, because if you do so it actually disappears! But many updates put things back there.
- slg 5y ago
  Ads are telemetry now? Is "telemetry" just a catch all for "anything software does that I don't like"?

jjcon 5y ago

This is why I treat windows as my gaming console at this point. I game on it, thats it. Everything important I leave to linux/mac.

andrepd 5y ago
Wine/Proton is so good that you might find you don't even need it for that.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  Games consistently get fewer FPS on my setup. 3750H GTX1650. Part of it is nvidia drivers being poopoo, most of it being CPU cycles overhead.
  - skohan 5y ago
    In my experience the nvidia drivers have been getting much better recently. Proton's not perfect, but it's been mostly worth it for me not to have to boot windows.
    - Bancakes 5y ago
      Agreed. For anyone interested in FPS boost, try glorious eggroll proton. I personally compile it myself off the AUR with the -O3 -march=native flags (look at the PKGBUILD for more details), and I get fewer FPS than Windows, yet more consistently than Wine. No microstuttering.
    - mvolfik 5y ago
      My experience is that even running Among Us (i.e. a very simple game) via Steam/Proton on Ubuntu LTS (i.e. the most common platform) was quite fiddly. Didn't have chance to try much else, Factorio is luckily native
- jjcon 5y ago
  For most things absolutely- I’ve had great success with proton. There are a few holdouts, especially in the VR space where Windows is still unfortunately very necessary.

judge2020 5y ago

> and has been collecting troves of personal data through Windows 10 How much PII is really collected via W10 telemetry? Or is the amount of times you click the start menu, accidentally search for something via Bing, then close that window now considered personal information?

reaperducer 5y ago
It doesn't matter if it's PII or not. You ask before collecting. That's basic decency. Not your computer. Not your data.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Not your computer. Not your data. Unfortunately, Microsoft thinks otherwise. See the huge discussion here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629350 (tl;dr: thanks to Secure Boot, Microsoft had to give permission for Linux to boot.) Also, don't forget the whole "Windows as a service" crap.
varispeed 5y ago
Your behaviour is personal to you and it is possible to identify a person based on that data.
shostack 5y ago
For me it's a question if whether it is ever linked or able to be linked to specific app usage or details of that usage (thing Edge browsing behavior). With industry privacy changes, having a persistent login at the OS level let's you do an end run around privacy protections in a browser, or incognito mode type stuff potentially.

nightski 5y ago

I've been using Windows 10 since it's initial release and have never had telemetry automatically re enabled. I check the relevant settings regularly (every few months). I have no idea what all people on HN are doing that causes this to happen so frequently to them but it's never been a real problem. I wish I knew what I was doing differently so I could make a blog post about it haha.

zinekeller 5y ago
I mean, what the HN and tech in general (edit: not general - sorry) audience wants is a totally zero telemetry, even if said telemetry is literally the list of installed updates. I personally think that's genuinely weird to me, since that Microsoft's "basic" telemetry only sends critical data like how many times Windows crash (and actually has the data reduced from 2015's state).
- nightski 5y ago
  Yeah, knowing how much telemetry has helped me improve the user experience in the internal apps I work on I really don't think it is that evil. I think people just wish it was easier to enable/disable and that Microsoft was more transparent about it.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    I think that the possibility of abuse (which has happened), possibility of government requesting that data (also happened, plus people here tends to be not inclined to give their data to any government), and possibility of leakage (general leakage not happened with Microsoft, but there's state-level hacks) means that even telemetry is tainted with privacy issues.
  - skohan 5y ago
    As someone who has worked on user-facing software, the part which bothers me the most is the reversal of user settings. MS is really bad about this, and even broke a linux install on a separate partition on my machine by changing the UEFI settings after an update without asking me. If I shipped software which did this, I would feel like I had to turn in my developer card.

skohan 5y ago

I sometimes wonder how profitable it actually is for Microsoft to be so pushy on data. What I mean is: I understand that MS is quite zealous internally about telemetry, but how effective is this data in terms of actually improving their profitability? From the user side, I am quite sure it is hurting the experience. One example is logins. MS is pretty bad about requiring logins for products which don't really require it in order to complete the user journey - for instance I bought the Halo collection on Steam, and in order to play an offline, single-player game I have to log into an MS account. As a result I haven't played the game in months, because I have to use this MS account that I don't even want to have, and I can't be bothered to reset the password for when there are other games I can play which just start up with no arbitrary hoop to jump through. And what does MS actually get out of it? I guess they can optimize their dark UI patterns to be better at tricking people into setting Edge as their default browser? Being data driven is good, but it seems to me it's not working if the end result is compromising the core user experience.

freeone3000 5y ago
User telemetry replaces what were once focus groups and market research. Without telemetry, Microsoft would be unable to determine what products were used, what features were used, and unable to determine prioritization for backwards compatibility and bugfixes, because it chose to rely on telemetry for basic business operations.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  User telemetry replaces what were once focus groups and market research. These things still exist, and many companies still use focus groups and market research. The company I work for, for example, does this extensively because I'm in the healthcare space and the legal department doesn't want us collecting information about our users without them really really really knowing its happening. Another example is MailChimp. It not only does video interviews with its users to determine how they use the product, it pays you for your time. Microsoft has the money and staff to do this basic research. "Telemetry" is just a synonym for lazy and cheap.

yyyk 5y ago

Well, if you're using Windows you're stuck with Microsoft anyway. It's preferable not to add Amazon to the mix. I'm not sure how the terms of the integration go, this could be avoidable - and it would be awesome if it was possible to port F-Droid to Windows.