42 ms·

Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant, so I expected to see all these thing

by ewzimm 11y ago

Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant, so I expected to see all these things as defaults. The advanced features just couldn't work without it. I'm glad there's at least an opt-out, but I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data. I generally use that on my browser for when I hand my laptop to someone else and don't want their activity polluting my history, but now there's the risk of the entire OS learning someone else's habits when they just need to use the computer and don't want to log in. Sometimes, guest accounts are too restrictive. I do like having the option of a personalized experience, and Microsoft is generally one of the most restrictive companies when it comes to sharing data. With their push toward more personal cloud services, I hope they will take special care to maintain that record, although everyone knows that certain groups like government have ways of getting whatever they want if it's available. Hopefully, some of the fine-grained permissions of Windows Phone will soon carry over to the unified platform for those who want it, but either way, I would still do any especially sensitive work on Debian or a similar system.

Kenji 11y ago
but now there's the risk of the entire OS learning someone else's habits when they just need to use the computer They already do pollute the OS history with their behaviours. Examples would be the DNS cache, the thumbnail database and the temp directory. Most people just don't know about these or look at them. But they can be very revealing. The problem I have is that the OS is so ready to upload things. I don't want my OS to upload anything at all, unless I command it to do so.
bargl 11y ago
I've been waiting for this comment, I can see how the first set of customization options really seem like they'd help with the personal assistant. It would be interesting to get a full audit of where your data goes and what they can use it for (training your personal assistant, improving their algorithms, responding to Govt data requests, improving ads, etc). As for incognito, can you sign into windows as guest now? Or even have multiple accounts on the same pc? If so you could create a guest/dummy account if you are interested in giving the personal assistant pure data.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  It's still possible to create a local guest account, but that means giving up a lot of settings that I might want to maintain on the regular account, and it's a hassle to have to log out and in again just because I don't want to record something. Maybe I want to plan a surprise trip for someone who also uses the computer or get information about a strange rash that might be nothing without making that part of my permanent record. Maybe I want to let someone else use software which requires an account, like edit a file on Adobe CS or fix a bug inside Visual Studio, without having everything they do become part of my profile.
  - bargl 11y ago
    Good point an incognito button would make it a lot easier, but this could be a work around.
  - teamonkey 11y ago
    > It's still possible to create a local guest account Is it? I haven't tried the release build yet but this was removed from the preview.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Yeah there should definitely be a "Hey Cortana, off the record,..." query mode. I'm a bit conflicted now. My girls are 7 & 9 and they've been using Microsoft Accounts. With the final Win10 build having all this (none of these settings worked a few months ago), it looks like I've got a lot of reading and explaining to do for them.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  This is a great suggestion. I'm getting sick of having to open incongito mode on Chrome unless I want Google Now to happily repeat whatever I was looking at later. Uh, I don't need reminders for sales on hemorrhoid medicine or news alerts about the side effects of MDMA. I don't need that popping up where others can see it. Some kind of "off the record" mode would be invaluable for voice interfaces. Hell, it would be nice if there was a check box under the Google search box as well, but I imagine Google would never make it too easy to avoid their data mining. I feel like we never had the proper privacy conversation we needed to have with companies like MS, Google, Facebook, etc. I think some level of easy to use yet strict segregation between what I consider my public life and my private life should be cooked-in, and enabled by default, into all this software.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    I agree completely. The split between public and private life is so natural that we sometimes forget how important it is. Sometimes people need to be able to experiment and access information privately so they can think it over without being judged. It leads more genuine expressions in public life, even in simple ways. Maybe I want to experiment with listening to all the worst pop music to see if there's something in there I like without my music player thinking I love all of it.
    - nsns 11y ago
      Absolutely. Or take for example my friend, who's a literary translator - she sometimes has to research online the most outlandish and obscure subjects, which have no bearing on her own interests...
joosters 11y ago
It's possible to do all this personalization without giving away your data to advertisers. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to. Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  1. Know everything about a person store it and mine it at scale. 2. ??? 3. Profit.
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  I mean, you have to admit that desktop-based recognition is just not as good as cloud-based offerings. This is true across the board, having more data and power available will give better results.
  - joosters 11y ago
    Sure, but desktop-based recognition has been improving all the time and may well be good enough. It still doesn't mean we have to lose our privacy just because a slightly better technology might be out there.
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. Especially with all three of the big companies having serious cloud-based recognition offerings and focusing on them. And seriously, Cortana would be useless without the cloud aspect. Half the things it does revolve around connecting your digital life together by accessing various things about you. Without the cloud, it's literally just Windows 8 search.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        > Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. How is that? Desktop systems respond quickly, cloud systems often respond after a second - it takes time for data to do a round-trip over crappy mobile connection. Mobile latency is a big thing. I agree wrt. Cortana (and Siri, Google Now) - most of the things you use them for will require Internet access. But there are still a lot of things that you could do with voice that shouldn't require a network connection, and we're missing the ability now. Not to mention you have zero customization options for cloud-based recognition. I could make good ol' MS Speech API recognize pretty much anything I wanted it to. No problem making it recognize a limited subset of two languages at the same time. With cloud-based systems, if the voice recognition doesn't like my accent, I'm out of luck.
elektromekatron 11y ago
Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant They should have called it "Clippy's Revenge"
nsgoetz 11y ago
I love this idea - I just submitted it as a suggestion in the feedback app.
vlunkr 11y ago
"The advanced features just couldn't work without it." I don't know much about Windows 10, so I'm curious what features you are referring to that require heavy tracking like this.
- api 11y ago
  We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual audio data? Instead of sending actual audio, send and receive very non-personalized non-specific derived model data to/from a repository somewhere (or even peer to peer).
  - gambiter 11y ago
    You realize the 'personal assistant' functionality of today is slightly more complex than just speech recognition, right? Because, it is.
    - _rob 11y ago
      Can you give me an example? And why not have all the features that can be done locally be done locally. If it's possible for my computer to understand me entering an apportionment, why should that go to a MS sever to be stored forever?
      - gambiter 11y ago
        How do you think your computer can understand 'entering an appointment'? There's a lot more that goes into understanding than JUST speech recognition. First of all, speech recognition by itself isn't exactly trivial, and that's become more and more obvious as we've seen the smallest accent mess with the digital assistants on all the major phones. Yes, technically, Dragon Naturally Speaking existed a decade ago and worked somewhat, but needed a LOT of training, and was dumb as a brick. It doesn't compare. But beyond that, understanding the meaning of the spoken word is difficult too. Yes, NLTs exist, and they can be very good, but you really need something that a team is administering. They can identify pain points and do regular updates to help... things like an odd band name that is ALWAYS misunderstood, some odd combination of words that confuses a question with a 911 call, etc., otherwise you're just going to end up frustrated. I should also mention that a digital assistant really needs the power of a full search engine behind it. This allows for auto-correction of mispronounced words, but it also allows near-instant lookups for relevant information. If this was running on your local machine, not only will the processing be slow for some things, it will also be more limited in it's ability to fully process all possible meanings, and it will need to be updated CONSTANTLY. These companies, by putting the language processing in the cloud, are throwing teams and hardware at the problem, and yet they STILL have embarrassing difficulties when it comes to actually understanding sometimes. Consider that for a moment... hundreds, even thousands of servers running the latest software for processing natural language for multi-millions of people aren't capable of getting your meaning 100% of the time. Incidentally, I realize that there some open source projects out there that do some rudimentary voice recognition and processing, however they suffer from the same issues addressed above and are MUCH more limited in many many ways. Many of them still make use of cloud-based services for processing the audio, btw. The one advantage, I will say, is that you have to ability to add your own custom commands and actions, which the major systems obviously don't allow.
Animats 11y ago
"Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant." Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? This is not going to fly with business customers. Microsoft has already bombed twice in the business space, with Windows Vista and Windows 8. This looks like another bomb. Windows 7 is still pretty good, and it will probably be the main Microsoft desktop OS for years to come, despite what Microsoft wants.
- kleiba 11y ago
  Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? This is not going to fly with business customers. ...nor with some private customers. Microsoft seems to be overlooking that not all nations are so happy about "the cloud" as the average American seems to be. Germany for one, where I currently live, is much more sceptical of sharing personal data -- potentially motivated by some of its 20th century history. But all that aside, a lot of people only used their computer occasionally, say to write a letter (again, Germany, a lot of bureaucracy still requires paper letters over here). Transparently syncing documents with an external server that you have absolutely no control over is really nothing such a user wants.
  - Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
    And yet to do your tax online in Germany you'll have to use Elster which is Windows only. Telling them I'll sign my pdfs with SHA-256 didn't help... So back to cellulose data carriers
    - FeepingCreature 11y ago
      Does ElsterOnline not work for your usecase?
  - Amezarak 11y ago
    > Transparently syncing documents with an external server that you have absolutely no control over is really nothing such a user wants. Onedrive on Windows 10 explicitly asked me "what folders do you want to sync?" when it first popped up.
pbreit 11y ago
"I expected to see all these as defaults". It would be fine if they were defaults if you actually saw them.
- npizzolato 11y ago
  What are you talking about? From the article, the "get going fast" picture displays the settings you're agreeing to when using the express settings. It's one page of content. And clicking on "customize" gives you more detail. I mean, I agree with the article that the layout is definitely pushing people who don't care to just pressing "agree", but if you care about privacy, it's not like it's hidden from you.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    I dunno, it's not nearly as clear as the individual setting explanations.
brownbat 11y ago
> OS-wide incognito mode Great point... Where's that utopian future where we bounce between a dozen purpose-built VMs, each customized to the task we're doing?
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  There's an OS project run by Joanna Rutkowska and some other folks called Qubes that does exactly that. It's really interesting work by sharp people. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/
TimFogarty 11y ago
> I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data. Sounds like switching to a guest account. Not as quick as a simple "toggle data recording" button, but that functionality is definitely already in Windows.
Aoyagi 11y ago
> fine-grained permissions of Windows Phone What do you mean by that? Not only you can't set any access rights for applications (they get what they ask for and you can either accept all or not install the application), but the OS also synchronizes your main account's contacts and calendar to THE CLOUD without asking you, telling you, and even without a way to opt out of it.
mattkrea 11y ago
> Microsoft is generally one of the most restrictive companies when it comes to sharing data. Citation needed?
Grue3 11y ago
>I expected to see all these things as defaults Really? You expected what is basically a built-in keylogger?

by ewzimm 11y ago

Kenji 11y ago

but now there's the risk of the entire OS learning someone else's habits when they just need to use the computer They already do pollute the OS history with their behaviours. Examples would be the DNS cache, the thumbnail database and the temp directory. Most people just don't know about these or look at them. But they can be very revealing. The problem I have is that the OS is so ready to upload things. I don't want my OS to upload anything at all, unless I command it to do so.

bargl 11y ago

I've been waiting for this comment, I can see how the first set of customization options really seem like they'd help with the personal assistant. It would be interesting to get a full audit of where your data goes and what they can use it for (training your personal assistant, improving their algorithms, responding to Govt data requests, improving ads, etc). As for incognito, can you sign into windows as guest now? Or even have multiple accounts on the same pc? If so you could create a guest/dummy account if you are interested in giving the personal assistant pure data.

ewzimm 11y ago
It's still possible to create a local guest account, but that means giving up a lot of settings that I might want to maintain on the regular account, and it's a hassle to have to log out and in again just because I don't want to record something. Maybe I want to plan a surprise trip for someone who also uses the computer or get information about a strange rash that might be nothing without making that part of my permanent record. Maybe I want to let someone else use software which requires an account, like edit a file on Adobe CS or fix a bug inside Visual Studio, without having everything they do become part of my profile.
- bargl 11y ago
  Good point an incognito button would make it a lot easier, but this could be a work around.
- teamonkey 11y ago
  > It's still possible to create a local guest account Is it? I haven't tried the release build yet but this was removed from the preview.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Yeah there should definitely be a "Hey Cortana, off the record,..." query mode. I'm a bit conflicted now. My girls are 7 & 9 and they've been using Microsoft Accounts. With the final Win10 build having all this (none of these settings worked a few months ago), it looks like I've got a lot of reading and explaining to do for them.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
This is a great suggestion. I'm getting sick of having to open incongito mode on Chrome unless I want Google Now to happily repeat whatever I was looking at later. Uh, I don't need reminders for sales on hemorrhoid medicine or news alerts about the side effects of MDMA. I don't need that popping up where others can see it. Some kind of "off the record" mode would be invaluable for voice interfaces. Hell, it would be nice if there was a check box under the Google search box as well, but I imagine Google would never make it too easy to avoid their data mining. I feel like we never had the proper privacy conversation we needed to have with companies like MS, Google, Facebook, etc. I think some level of easy to use yet strict segregation between what I consider my public life and my private life should be cooked-in, and enabled by default, into all this software.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  I agree completely. The split between public and private life is so natural that we sometimes forget how important it is. Sometimes people need to be able to experiment and access information privately so they can think it over without being judged. It leads more genuine expressions in public life, even in simple ways. Maybe I want to experiment with listening to all the worst pop music to see if there's something in there I like without my music player thinking I love all of it.
  - nsns 11y ago
    Absolutely. Or take for example my friend, who's a literary translator - she sometimes has to research online the most outlandish and obscure subjects, which have no bearing on her own interests...

joosters 11y ago

It's possible to do all this personalization without giving away your data to advertisers. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to. Why do people seem to gloss over the fact that we can implement these technologies without losing privacy? e.g. voice recognition has been possible on home computers for decades now. You don't need the cloud for it.

andy_ppp 11y ago
1. Know everything about a person store it and mine it at scale. 2. ??? 3. Profit.
mynameisvlad 11y ago
I mean, you have to admit that desktop-based recognition is just not as good as cloud-based offerings. This is true across the board, having more data and power available will give better results.
- joosters 11y ago
  Sure, but desktop-based recognition has been improving all the time and may well be good enough. It still doesn't mean we have to lose our privacy just because a slightly better technology might be out there.
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. Especially with all three of the big companies having serious cloud-based recognition offerings and focusing on them. And seriously, Cortana would be useless without the cloud aspect. Half the things it does revolve around connecting your digital life together by accessing various things about you. Without the cloud, it's literally just Windows 8 search.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has. How is that? Desktop systems respond quickly, cloud systems often respond after a second - it takes time for data to do a round-trip over crappy mobile connection. Mobile latency is a big thing. I agree wrt. Cortana (and Siri, Google Now) - most of the things you use them for will require Internet access. But there are still a lot of things that you could do with voice that shouldn't require a network connection, and we're missing the ability now. Not to mention you have zero customization options for cloud-based recognition. I could make good ol' MS Speech API recognize pretty much anything I wanted it to. No problem making it recognize a limited subset of two languages at the same time. With cloud-based systems, if the voice recognition doesn't like my accent, I'm out of luck.

elektromekatron 11y ago

Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant They should have called it "Clippy's Revenge"

nsgoetz 11y ago

I love this idea - I just submitted it as a suggestion in the feedback app.

vlunkr 11y ago

"The advanced features just couldn't work without it." I don't know much about Windows 10, so I'm curious what features you are referring to that require heavy tracking like this.

api 11y ago
We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual audio data? Instead of sending actual audio, send and receive very non-personalized non-specific derived model data to/from a repository somewhere (or even peer to peer).
- gambiter 11y ago
  You realize the 'personal assistant' functionality of today is slightly more complex than just speech recognition, right? Because, it is.
  - _rob 11y ago
    Can you give me an example? And why not have all the features that can be done locally be done locally. If it's possible for my computer to understand me entering an apportionment, why should that go to a MS sever to be stored forever?
    - gambiter 11y ago
      How do you think your computer can understand 'entering an appointment'? There's a lot more that goes into understanding than JUST speech recognition. First of all, speech recognition by itself isn't exactly trivial, and that's become more and more obvious as we've seen the smallest accent mess with the digital assistants on all the major phones. Yes, technically, Dragon Naturally Speaking existed a decade ago and worked somewhat, but needed a LOT of training, and was dumb as a brick. It doesn't compare. But beyond that, understanding the meaning of the spoken word is difficult too. Yes, NLTs exist, and they can be very good, but you really need something that a team is administering. They can identify pain points and do regular updates to help... things like an odd band name that is ALWAYS misunderstood, some odd combination of words that confuses a question with a 911 call, etc., otherwise you're just going to end up frustrated. I should also mention that a digital assistant really needs the power of a full search engine behind it. This allows for auto-correction of mispronounced words, but it also allows near-instant lookups for relevant information. If this was running on your local machine, not only will the processing be slow for some things, it will also be more limited in it's ability to fully process all possible meanings, and it will need to be updated CONSTANTLY. These companies, by putting the language processing in the cloud, are throwing teams and hardware at the problem, and yet they STILL have embarrassing difficulties when it comes to actually understanding sometimes. Consider that for a moment... hundreds, even thousands of servers running the latest software for processing natural language for multi-millions of people aren't capable of getting your meaning 100% of the time. Incidentally, I realize that there some open source projects out there that do some rudimentary voice recognition and processing, however they suffer from the same issues addressed above and are MUCH more limited in many many ways. Many of them still make use of cloud-based services for processing the audio, btw. The one advantage, I will say, is that you have to ability to add your own custom commands and actions, which the major systems obviously don't allow.

Animats 11y ago

"Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant." Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? This is not going to fly with business customers. Microsoft has already bombed twice in the business space, with Windows Vista and Windows 8. This looks like another bomb. Windows 7 is still pretty good, and it will probably be the main Microsoft desktop OS for years to come, despite what Microsoft wants.

kleiba 11y ago
Who wanted that for desktop computers or laptops? This is not going to fly with business customers. ...nor with some private customers. Microsoft seems to be overlooking that not all nations are so happy about "the cloud" as the average American seems to be. Germany for one, where I currently live, is much more sceptical of sharing personal data -- potentially motivated by some of its 20th century history. But all that aside, a lot of people only used their computer occasionally, say to write a letter (again, Germany, a lot of bureaucracy still requires paper letters over here). Transparently syncing documents with an external server that you have absolutely no control over is really nothing such a user wants.
- Bouncingsoul1 11y ago
  And yet to do your tax online in Germany you'll have to use Elster which is Windows only. Telling them I'll sign my pdfs with SHA-256 didn't help... So back to cellulose data carriers
  - FeepingCreature 11y ago
    Does ElsterOnline not work for your usecase?
- Amezarak 11y ago
  > Transparently syncing documents with an external server that you have absolutely no control over is really nothing such a user wants. Onedrive on Windows 10 explicitly asked me "what folders do you want to sync?" when it first popped up.

pbreit 11y ago

"I expected to see all these as defaults". It would be fine if they were defaults if you actually saw them.

npizzolato 11y ago
What are you talking about? From the article, the "get going fast" picture displays the settings you're agreeing to when using the express settings. It's one page of content. And clicking on "customize" gives you more detail. I mean, I agree with the article that the layout is definitely pushing people who don't care to just pressing "agree", but if you care about privacy, it's not like it's hidden from you.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I dunno, it's not nearly as clear as the individual setting explanations.

brownbat 11y ago

> OS-wide incognito mode Great point... Where's that utopian future where we bounce between a dozen purpose-built VMs, each customized to the task we're doing?

sudioStudio64 11y ago
There's an OS project run by Joanna Rutkowska and some other folks called Qubes that does exactly that. It's really interesting work by sharp people. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/

TimFogarty 11y ago

> I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data. Sounds like switching to a guest account. Not as quick as a simple "toggle data recording" button, but that functionality is definitely already in Windows.

Aoyagi 11y ago

> fine-grained permissions of Windows Phone What do you mean by that? Not only you can't set any access rights for applications (they get what they ask for and you can either accept all or not install the application), but the OS also synchronizes your main account's contacts and calendar to THE CLOUD without asking you, telling you, and even without a way to opt out of it.

mattkrea 11y ago

> Microsoft is generally one of the most restrictive companies when it comes to sharing data. Citation needed?

Grue3 11y ago

>I expected to see all these things as defaults Really? You expected what is basically a built-in keylogger?