On the topic of Microsoft is not less evil than before : today I needed to use Teams, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact it supported a web client. I tried to use it and got caught in a tunnel of dark ux. You go to the website, click to sign in, get asked for your email and password, then verify your email, then you discover that you actually signed up for something else and now you can signup for teams. You follow the wizard again, then you are told to use Skype because you are not a company. You restart and make sure to check the box saying you are a company, then put your company info, it works! You try to start a call, and you get told it does not work in firefox...
That's not what I understand.<p>> diagnostic data collection (telemetry) is not enabled for private builds<p>> this data collection is covered by windows 10 privacy, You can find the windows 10 privacy statement and details of controlling the diagnostic and feedback settings here.<p>So if you build from source, you can disable it, and if you don't build from source but install it from the store, then telemetry is controlled by the central privacy settings in Windows 10.<p>Presumably this would be a problem only if you specifically don't want MS to have telemetry from winget, but you also specicifically want them to have telemetry on the rest of your OS, which would be... weird.
Are people worried about the actual contents of these kinds of telemetry, or rather just annoyed by the fact that it's there at all?<p>The first position seems a bit odd for something that is open source (so presumably you can verify what's being sent). I mean it might be bad to send "I installed product X" or "I used the command X" to a remote server, but on the other hand if I <i>really</i> feel this is a problem would I ever even be using the closed source binaries that the package manager installs, without worrying more what <i>they</i> might do, than what happened when the package manager ran?<p>Some times I get the feeling that the telemetry thing just became an expression of annoyance with something else entirely, or just the current state of affairs. It's like one of those cultural wars where every battle is so symbolic that everyone forgot what the real issue was ("Why do we worry so much about who uses which bathroom again dad?").
I find it outrageous; "Telemetry" is built into most new Microsoft software. For example, they recently released a replacement for powershell and CMD, called "Terminal 1.0", which also comes with some aggressive telemetry built in:<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/host/telemetry.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/host/t...</a><p>This also applies to newer releases of powershell, aka PS Core. I haven't tried either, but I guarantee you telemetry in both applications is not opt-in but opt out using some obscure method, if that is even possible.<p>In any case, the claim that telemetry is necessary to improve anything related to customer experience is ridiculous. Not only is a general data collection unnecessary; it would be more efficient to run some experiments, and be it some opt in A/B tests. Surveillance like the above is encroaching and can easily be abused. The data collected are usually fine-grained enough to allow for some nice fingerprinting of individual users. The potential for abuse is high.
Telemetry seems to be a sore and curt topic with Microsoft. I've yet to see anyone make headway on even just having a discussion about it with public facing MS devs; it almost always gets a quick, rote toe-the-line response and the discussion gets terminated or blackballed or ignored thereafter.<p>It has the airs of an internal mandate. I can't help but be deeply suspicious of this behaviour.
I recently installed an Insider build of Windows so I could use WSL2 to run some docker containers in a Linux environment.<p>The insider build requires that you enable full telemetry which includes sending your visited websites to MS. I need WSL2 so I’m just avoiding doing anything private on my personal computer for now.<p>I understand why the data is useful to them but I don’t think they understand or care why this is an important issue to others
My .02 cents. To me the arguments I read here around "but product improvement is hard so that justifies collecting the data" ring hollow. When your convenience at work is balanced against someones right to privacy, there's no middle ground. Privacy wins. You need active informed consent to phone home for reasons not related to the proper functioning of the application.<p>I wish most applications offered 3 boxes:<p>1) Don't send telemetry<p>2) Send data needed to catch bad rollouts (think SRE style status code and latency metrics).<p>3) Send anonymized data to help improve the product.<p>4) I want to be a beta tester/insider, you can capture my logs.
This whole bastardization of the word 'Telemetry' by the online community is completely abhorrent.<p>It is <i>impossible</i> to get proper usage feedback from your programs without being swayed by the vocal minority community.<p>We always find posts online on how crappy software is, but how can software improve if the majority of people actually using the software don't give feedback at all?<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1172/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1172/</a>
While I love WSL2, my biggest beef with the install process is I had to turn on almost every crap privacy-busting feature back on. I had 'decrapified' my Windows 10 install previously and the WSL2 reversed almost all that.
When it comes to things like this, it feels like old "Linux is a cancer" Microsoft is battling the new multi-platform open-source Microsoft for whether the company should be evil or not.
Since it’s open source, I wonder if anyone will be willing to maintain a branch that has all the telemetry removed, but is otherwise basically unchanged and so can connect to the normal repositories.
Tin foil hat here. The person posting this is the lead maintainer of Chocolatey, a long standing 3rd party Windows package manager.<p>Although the point is reasonable (why NOT just provide an opt out, like .NET SDK?), it seems to me that there is a potential ulterior motive in dragging down winget.
Opt out of Windows.<p>My last Windows 7 machine broke down, and the few Windows programs I needed to run are now running under Wine on Linux.<p>I've never used Windows 10 except in a store demo. Decided I didn't want it.
Why do we use MS's terminology for it (telemetry) when it is essentially theft of private and sensitive data?<p>From what I have gathered, they are snarfing up my browsing data and what applications I have installed. I don't have the time or energy to jump through the hoops to figure out how to stop this blatant invasion of my privacy. On top of that, I've read that win10 shows ads in the actual OS. That is so beyond unacceptable that I am stuck on an unsupported OS (7)<p>As a result, I now have only two windows7 boxes - one for gaming and one that I use as a front end for some specialized audio hardware. Each box is dedicated to that purpose and is relegated to a subnet. 20 years ago, 90% of my computing was on windows - now it is <10%. Soon, I'll get another mac to do all my audio work on and, eventually, I'll relegate my gaming to Linux available titles.
Ha... here's an experiment you can try on Windows, assuming you haven't previously taken steps to debloat the system.<p>1. Run procmon.exe /noconnect from Sysinternals<p>2. Filter -> Drop Filtered Events<p>3. Ctrl-L, Add Filter -> 'Path' Contains 'Telemetry' then 'Include' and Add<p>4. Press OK and then Ctrl-E (Start Capture)<p>5. Leave it running for a few minutes
Half-serious startup idea: Telemetry Escrow, where I send data to Escrow, can inspect what it is, then Microsoft pays per datum. Escrow holds all historicals / some samples, depending on tier.<p><i>Does the data have value?</i>, after all? How much..
The assumption that windows package manager does not permit opting out of telemetry seems to be wrong.<p>The whole issue is not stating how to opt out and someone assumed that it means it is not possible. However, based on the updated readme <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli#datatelemetry" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli#datatelemetry</a> there was a way to opt-out from the beggining, just not documented.<p>Yes, it should have been clarified from the start, but I think it's positive the option was always there and they managed to clarify how to opt-out in mere 7 hours.
Here is Microsoft's privacy dashboard: <a href="https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/</a><p>It lets you delete at least some of the data. Although I don't know if it includes the data from the package manager.<p>Here you can contact their Data Protection Officer if you would like to ask: <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/concern/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/concern/privacy</a>
According to a recent post, we spend 34 years of our lives staring at screens. If Microsoft wants 34 years of data on each of us, let's collectively bargain on a value for it.
Anybody else really turned off by the unnecessary amount of internet access in these new CLI tools? It's not just telemetry. Some tools will just access the internet even when they don't need to (my favourite is checking for a new version with every command). I like the CLI because it is so minimal and transparent (compared to GUI). But that seems to be changing these days.
I wouldn't mind the Windows telemetry, if it ever seemed like they were using it to actually fix things that suck. However, it's been almost ten years since the Start Menu search has worked at all, and wonky multi-monitor and settings/control panel settings dichotomies persist.<p>Some have posited that this official package manager will be a death blow to Chocolatey, but I doubt it.
I don't use Windows, and the only Microsoft product I have installed is VS Code (with telemetry explicitly disabled), but in spite of that about 10% of all the blocked DNS requests according to my pi-hole are to Microsoft's telemetry servers at watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.
I thought everyone knew it was the pseudo official Microsoft policy to extract as much data as possible. I mean if you use windows, you must be anyways used to something like this.
I would have expected Microsoft to stalk their users like always and go for an opt-out instead of an opt-in (which, by the way, is legally required according to the GDPR but national privacy offices seem unwilling to actually take Microsoft to court).<p>What's sad is that Microsoft actively lied in its description and privacy statement by stating it's possible to opt out of tracking. This is not possible for Windows 10 Home and Pro users. Advertising that opting out is possible when it's not is a blatant lie.