I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

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&#x27;t work without it. I&#x27;m glad there&#x27;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.<p>I generally use that on my browser for when I hand my laptop to someone else and don&#x27;t want their activity polluting my history, but now there&#x27;s the risk of the entire OS learning someone else&#x27;s habits when they just need to use the computer and don&#x27;t want to log in. Sometimes, guest accounts are too restrictive.<p>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&#x27;s available.<p>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.

It looks like Microsoft has installed the &quot;back door&quot; that FBI Director Comey wanted.[1][2] That may be the real motivation behind these &quot;features&quot;. The &quot;backing up&quot; of the local drive encryption key to Microsoft servers is one of the things the FBI specifically asks for. Any press reading this, ask Microsoft what communications they&#x27;ve had with the FBI regarding backdoors.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jul&#x2F;08&#x2F;fbi-chief-backdoor-access-encryption-isis" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jul&#x2F;08&#x2F;fbi-chief-...</a> [2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2014&#x2F;oct&#x2F;16&#x2F;fbi-director-attacks-tech-companies-encryption" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2014&#x2F;oct&#x2F;16&#x2F;fbi-director-...</a>

I find it shocking how people readily accept Google&#x27;s far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out.<p>For instance, in Android, Google tracks with GPS accuracy your whereabouts constantly. This isn&#x27;t just what IP your desktop is attached to. Furthermore, there is no prompt telling you this happens with a very easy way of undoing. In fact even if you knew about this it is very hard to find a way to disable.<p>Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged. Again, this is not explained in some easy opt-out screen and in fact the only way to get around this is to use SRWare Iron, where they removed that code.<p>But Microsoft makes it easy for you to choose the privacy options even telling you about them on install.

I&#x27;ve never understood how people can truly believe that by checking (or unchecking) a checkbox their privacy will be fully protected. Especially since we&#x27;re talking about a closed-source OS.<p>I mean I cannot possibly verify what exactly goes on in the annals of the operating system and what happens to my data, where it is logged and where it is stored and how it is sent.<p>So regardless of the settings, I always assume that my data is logged and read by some creepy agent in the Ministry of Truth.<p>If it&#x27;s not, then I&#x27;m just lucky.<p>Having grown up in a totalitarian state, that&#x27;s the default way I think about this stuff and no amount of promises (except the source code which I can personally compile) can make me trust any 3rd party corporation.

&quot;Send typing and inking data to Microsoft to improve the recognition and suggestion platform&quot;<p>&quot;Typing data&quot; sounds like keylogging. If it&#x27;s what it sounds like, that&#x27;s really emphatically not okay; that would include all passwords and the contents of all emails sent.<p>Would someone with actual knowledge care to chime in and say what data is actually sent? If it turns out that Windows 10 really is sending keystrokes to Microsoft by default, it seems likely to cause a significant backlash from Microsoft&#x27;s business and government customers.

It&#x27;s too bad that microsoft continues to be villainized when companies like Facebook and Google have social networks and browsers respectively that have similar practices that users are even more unaware of when they use them.<p>Computers these days have become thin clients for browsers (especially for the typical consumer). Except for the occasional open of Word or Excel, you&#x27;re in your web browser browsing the web and have a tab open for Facebook. With new features like &quot;sign into your browser&quot; or ad retargeting across the sites you visit today, consumers are already being subjected to practices that Microsoft at <i>least</i> gives you the ability to turn off piecemeal if you so wish. They&#x27;re just doing so at the operating system layer instead of the browser.<p>Think doing so at the operating system is more criminal than at the web browser or website level? Consider that Google Chrome is moving to become &quot;Chromebooks&quot; and that Android integrates Google Search. It&#x27;s already happening and we take Google&#x27;s &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; mantra for face value while continuing to poke Microsoft out of sheer habit.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbullrun.org&#x2F;surveillance&#x2F;2015&#x2F;video-2015.html#balkan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectbullrun.org&#x2F;surveillance&#x2F;2015&#x2F;video-2015.html...</a><p>Of course MS wants to get in on surveillance-as-a-business-model. It keeps people tied to your Service as a Software Substitute, and as long long as most people are still ignorant about how technology works, they won&#x27;t notice how the stalker-like nature of a lot of modern soft^H^H^H^Hmalware.<p>As for the few nerds that notice, they can probably be shut up with an obscure option to disable (most of?) the data collection; the number of people that even know the option exists will be insignificant. Some of those nerds can even be distracted with promises of &quot;open&quot; access (to our proprietary APIs we can remove or change without notice); if you phrase it right, it can even sound like &quot;open&quot; is referring to the commons. After a while, some of them may even build entire businesses based on feeding user surveillance data upstream. After a generation, the days of being able to write client software will be long forgotten.<p>--<p>The ongoing Theft Of Privacy (and the closely related The War On General Purpose Computing) are being fought, and this brazen behavior by Microsoft to take advantage user ignorance is taking yet another step down a dark path.<p>Which side are you going to be on? The side that is trying to maintain the remains of our privacy, an open internet, and free computing?<p>The apathetic side that fixes technical problems for themselves, while everybody else gets spied upon a little bit more while their tools become even more removed from their control? I hope you enjoy the consequences of rewarding this kind of behavior. Why should Microsoft (or anybody else) change when they still get paid and maintain their user-count?<p>Or are you the apparatchik, who thinks Cortana (or Alexa, or Siri, ... or Google Analytics) is a useful, cool piece of software? Surely the Big Data being collected is just going to be used for the stated purposes and could never have a noxious effect on users or become an attractive target for hackers or governments? If you&#x27;re in this category, you might just want to start paying attention to the larger games being played, because if you don&#x27;t start fighting for your future others may take it from you.

I dont&#x27; know why so many people are surprised by the Cortana data vacuum. Doesn&#x27;t Siri send everything you say to it to Apple or a &quot;trusted partner&quot;? Why would Cortana be any different?<p>The keylogger and Start menu ads are just creepy though. I shouldn&#x27;t have to opt-out of targeted ads INSIDE MY OS.

Of course you did. Large companies have no vested interest in building systems that do the &quot;right thing&quot; for you as defined by tech types like us who are arguably more sensitive on this subject than most people.<p>They are building services that take your information and try to do something interesting enough with it to make it worthwhile...and why is it on by default? Because they want to make money off of the new features and deep integration with your information.<p>This isn&#x27;t news. But it certainly may be another excuse to have the exact same conversation that nothing will come from.<p>Never mind that data generated and collected from cell phone usage will always make the privacy impinging features of your laptop look tame in comparison.<p>Never mind that the only way to stop companies from doing this is through the political processes that everyone seems to have written off.<p>EDIT: Downvoting because someone disagrees with the principal argument of the post is lame. Cheers.

This goes along with the news that Windows 10 backs up your drive encryption key by default, and that Microsoft can use it to decrypt your data. In &quot;good faith&quot;, of course.

Imagine if you discovered an exploit for TLS and just listened in on a public &#x2F; hotel network to tons of Windows machines sending keystrokes, calendar, contacts, etc to Microsoft in the background... At least in the Windows 95 days you had to write the key logger yourself and get it installed somehow.

People want to be connected, join social networks, download apps, be able to control their appliances from across the ocean, carry devices loaded with sensors everywhere they go--and on top of all it, they want privacy.<p>These are fun and interesting times.

I lost trust into Microsoft when they put an &quot;Outlook&quot; app into the Android app store, which when connected to an Exchange server downloads all the account messages and calendar data to a cloud server (probably in order to have push messages whithout changing Exchange itself). Really Microsoft, why do you think I have an Exchange server. Because it is easy to set up, administer and costs nothing?

Wi-Fi Sense is a huge security hole, and even if you don&#x27;t have windows 10, if anyone you trust with access to your network upgrades to windows 10, that person becomes a security problem for you.<p>Obvious solution is to use a strong generated string for your password (so even if they get your password, they&#x27;re not getting the password to anything else), and then configure your router to require each device connecting to be authenticated. Whitelist for MAC addresses + GPG + ?

This might be the first time you&#x27;ll need a firewall to protect yourself from internal attacks by the OS itself. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll be updating to windows 10 any time soon.

Someone I know who has been in the cracking&#x2F;warez scene for over 20 years, and did a lot of analysis on the XP activation scheme when it first came out, had this to say about Windows 10 and the trend in general:<p><i>Remember Gates said, about piracy &quot;we&#x27;ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade&quot;? It is happening now. And lots of other software&#x2F;service are becoming &quot;free&quot; or massive discount, since selling your data is much more profit. Crack was about using software without paying money. Maybe in future it will be without paying with personal data or privacy. We will find a way, always. :-)</i>

This is more of a rhetorical question, but why does every modern OS and browser need to try and become a computing leviathan? Why can&#x27;t my hammer ever be happy just driving nails? I don&#x27;t need a hammer that cooks waffles.

This was also recently brought to my attention:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9973629" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9973629</a><p>Windows 10 RTM has peer to peer updates over the internet as the default. I could swear it defaulted to local-only in the preview, so I didn&#x27;t even check it until now after doing a clean install of RTM.

I don&#x27;t intend on leaving any of these on when I install Windows 10 but some of these seem to correspond directly with the whole &quot;Cortana as personal assistant&quot; thing. And there is whole separate system for controlling what Cortana knows about you.

This is why i think Tim Cook is genius for marketing Apple as the anti &quot;We sell all your data and spy on you&quot; companies.

Shouldn&#x27;t Windows at this stage just fork and split in to two? One can be the dumping ground of all kind of social&#x2F;phone&#x2F;tablet crap where consumers sign away their unborn children, and the other for businesses and people that want to get stuff done?

The most troubling part is &quot;Telemetry&quot;, which only Enterprise edition clients can disable completely.

I like how they put that &quot;Customize Settings&quot; Link down there. I missed it the first time I did it completely.<p>Nice job design devils.

Why isn&#x27;t more being made of the fact that on default Windows 10 installs, it will automatically connect you to open WiFi hotspots? That is a MAJOR security risk and yet not 1 single comment here about it

The little four-squares icon that popped up few weeks go on my Windows 7 desktop notification zone, spamming me with messages to update for free to Win10, cannot be uninstalled, is deeply rooted into parts of OS Win7 through KB updates and crashes at least twice a day. With hibernated computer, it somehow forces LAN to awake, as a result blu-screening otherwise perfectly well hibernated session.<p>For this reasons alone, I think Win7 will be my most loved and probably last version of Windows I will ever use.

The idea of an operating system integrating with services like that still bothers me even though it is done in Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

I&#x27;ll bet everything in my pocket that Windows 10 does not keylog every stroke and send it back to Microsoft servers for storage.<p>It&#x27;s intellectually dishonest to think that&#x27;s what s going on, because it ruins the conversation about what they&#x27;re <i>actually</i> doing.

I think it is about time that we (the users) reclaim the right to our data and what we do with it. Never since the days of mainframes and timesharing have we been turning over so much of our (personal) data and the processing of it to third-party, centralized servers. Our computers are starting to look like nothing more than fancy graphics terminals, just a few steps up from the VT100&#x27;s of yore.<p>It&#x27;s about time we start doing something about this.

Some of these are scary. But sending to M$ what I&#x27;m typing? That&#x27;s the exact definition of a keylogger - it&#x27;s straight up bundled malware.

Upon seeing these options in the installation, I thought I downloaded beta version that needs these for feedbacks Realizing I have installed retail version, I regretted my decision now I will read the all EULA for the firet time in my lifetime to see what it gets without asking. And probably I will just keep windows for games only.

I saw this earlier on Twitter via @adrianchm. Win 10 includes keylogger setting, auto-re-opt-in malware protection, no opt-out for updates, and <i>ADS</i> in the start screen:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prntscr.com&#x2F;7ykzbh" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prntscr.com&#x2F;7ykzbh</a>

Also if you use Cortana, its default settings are sending MSFT location history, search history etc. I turned it off on Edge as well as by default.

As I noted here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedreaming.org&#x2F;201.." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedreaming.org&#x2F;201..</a>. you shuld also go to &quot;Settings&quot; -&gt; &quot;Accounts&quot; -&gt; &quot;Sync your Settings&quot; and turn off Password syncing, which is enabled by default. I would <i>hope</i> that passwords are encrypted with my Microsoft account password (and I would further hope that only a hash of this password is stored on Microsoft servers) but no where is any of this explained. There&#x27;s a &quot;How does sync work&quot; link at the top of the page, but clicking on it takes you to a Bing search which explains how to turn syncing on and off.

They can technically do anything they want with the input you provide. Personally I would never trust an opaque operating system even <i>if</i> they provided clear details as to what the configuration options are and how they are used.

Would be nice if he even tried to lookup what these things are used for. It is well known things like OneNote let you search handwritten notes, for example, using fuzzy logic and context. So it is a clear benefit to users. Instead he seemed to just hand wave something negative about each.<p>Similarly, MS originally defaulted to not allowing cross site advertising identifiers by default and was criticized by organizations that make their money off this like Google and Firefox. Seems like they can&#x27;t win no matter which default they pick.

Said this in another thread:<p>Not sure what the fuss is about, the same old rule applies: if you want your data to be private, don&#x27;t use any form of cloud services - server based voice&#x2F;video chat, cloud storage services (google drive, skydrive, icloud), digital assistants (siri, cortana, google now), any contextual based delivered services which &quot;learns&quot; anything about you to provide you with any form of automated and&#x2F;or dynamic experience.<p>If you want to be treated like you live in a box, then you&#x27;re going to have to live by it.<p>Everyone complaining and &quot;fed up&quot;, closing their MSDN accounts, boycotting MSFT products - you&#x27;re in an echo chamber which won&#x27;t be heard as our devices become more service oriented rather than boxed solutions. MSFT is trying to stay relevant, not undermine their massive user base. Whether it is right or wrong, I don&#x27;t have an opinion on, but if you think MSFT is a pioneer in this space, you&#x27;re being unjustly biased.<p>I guess the only thing we can complain about is that we aren&#x27;t given a &quot;closed&#x2F;boxed&quot; solution and able to accept the TOS to services we want on an adhoc basis - we have to go and disable services and hope that the TOS we agreed to needn&#x27;t apply.<p>Perhaps these are growing pains for the direction services are heading because we shouldn&#x27;t have to accept invasion of privacy as a default.

Microsoft Windows 10 invasion . Yes like Matrix, The Terminator . Wowww stop, not is the right way.<p>I think that Microsoft are crazy to think that can control the pcs of users because launch Windows 10 upgrade for free. Tks Microsoft for the upgrade, but not is with it that the enterprise will buy my privacy, control my PC, what I install, what I do with my computer, etc, etc, etc, the machine is mine and I want to continue owner of it. I not want show to me many things that I not want to see, install app that I not want and use in my pc, use of the my internet connection to send things to internet. Want my collaboration, ok I can think in this, but when I want, not when Microsoft want.<p>Sure have many users that not understand what are happens, but are much users that are advanced users and know what happens and how neutralize this privacy invasion.<p>My first impression in these day about Windows 10 is cool for other side. I think that can be the right successor of Window 7, but ... no using the unilateral ideas to force users share all with Microsoft, that Windows 10 will be a good OS. Need respect the privacy of the users. If not is like windows 8, 8.1 that not win the market because try to force all to have new hardware, etc. If go in this direction we have Linux, Windows 7 to use and who know, Android OS to PCs, is now a good time to this smiles. Yes, this is a technological war, users in a side and Google, Microsoft and others in the other. But who buy computers, OS, software are the users. The true own of market. Sorry for errors english not is my native language, but I think that is possible understand.

&gt; Who are the trusted partners? By whom are they trusted? I am certainly not the one doing any trusting right now.<p>In security, &quot;trusted&quot; has a very simple and straightforward definition:<p><pre><code> Trusted (adj.) - Liable to create a security breach. </code></pre> That&#x27;s what it means, nothing more, nothing less. It means that YOU are going to have to trust these third partners to not screw you over.<p>Whether you know who they are or not, it means that you trust them with your private data.<p>&quot;Trusted&quot; is never a good thing. With proper security and privacy logic in place you shouldn&#x27;t need to &quot;trust&quot; anyone.<p>Indeed it means that I &quot;trust&quot; the NSA (and local Dutch agencies conscripted by them) with any data that I send or receive that is not strongly encrypted. I don&#x27;t get a lot of choice in the matter, so I&#x27;m going to have to &quot;trust&quot; they won&#x27;t screw me over with it, sell it to bad actors, keep it safe for as long as they keep it. No it&#x27;s not a very smart idea to &quot;trust&quot; them, but I don&#x27;t get a lot of say in the matter ...

&quot;You&quot; are the product now.

Am I the only one seeing the irony in a speculative post about privacy on a site that uses Google Analytics and Disqus?

Apple must have known this a few months back and the result was their privacy centric marketing campaign.

It just makes you reminisce back to a simpler time when you&#x27;d save all of your personal data and key logs to floppies and then mail &#x27;em to Microsoft.<p>Sigh...I can still smell the sharpie ink and wet postage drying on the back of a manila envelope.

I have a 2nd partition with Windows 7 on my desktop, but I run UbuntuMATE (in Redmond panel mode) 99% of the time. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m going to update from 7 to 10 anymore, just don&#x27;t see the point with this and the hardware lock-in. I like my real license that I already have.<p>If I make any changes to my system I&#x27;ll probably delete UbuntuMATE and Win7 and just run Mint. Seems really slick and mostly respects the user. Just despise those notification catchers in most distros like Mint. UM in Redmond mode is the only one that just flashes the taskbar icon upon notifications, which makes perfect sense to me. Less to manage&#x2F;check on.

I am pretty much a noob at Windows (linux guy here) :P, but what kind of personalization does windows offer from this data? And is that personalization possible with client side processing only?

All companies should be legally required to make those invasive privacy settings opt-in and not opt-out... and maybe attach some jail time consequences for CEOs for violating these new laws.

Microsoft can&#x27;t lock-in user to OS because most of the apps are now multiplatform so they are locking-in to their services and profiting from big data.<p>EU will take a look on those practices soon :)

Windows 8 suddenly turns out to be the best OS Microsoft ever made.

If these are still the defaults for the $199 boxed version of Windows 10 Pro (including all the things like ads in the OS), I’ll be pretty disappointed. OS X is free as well (and has been for years), but Apple hasn’t pulled crap like putting ads in the OS (probably at least partly because it’s nontrivial to run OS X without buying Apple hardware… all the more reason to be disappointed if Microsoft <i>still</i> includes tracking and ad crap when you’re actually paying for the OS).

You are the product now.

some copy from Microsofts &quot;The Future Starts Now&quot; campaign: &quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Learning and growing with you - The more personal experience of Windows 10 includes Cortana, your truly personal assistant. Cortana works across all of your Windows 10 devices to learn your preferences, offer suggestions, set reminders, play your music, answer questions and more. Welcome to a future with Windows 10. It can recognize you, respond to you and even learn with you. So you can create and share in ways you never thought possible. Now is the time to do great things. #Windows10&lt;&#x2F;i&gt;&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;&quot;&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;&#x2F;sup&gt;<p>It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s hidden in their terms and conditions. And, bluntly, I&#x27;m assuming many people reading this are working on similar technology for smaller companies. But, to paraphrase Nick Naylor in &#x27;Thank You For Smoking&#x27;, you just need to pay the mortgage, right?<p>Additionally, the conversation on this page seems to betray that most of us didn&#x27;t read the memo that the concept of privacy has changed and now no longer includes concepts like, &quot;You only get to know things about me that I disclose to you.&quot; That has now transformed into what might be captured in the sentiment, &quot;You may not use what you know about me in any way explicitly disallowed by the terms &amp; conditions&quot;. I can&#x27;t find it now, but back in the day, wayyyy back, Brin and Page made the argument that one day people would trust their personal information to companies the same way that they trust their money with banks. This is that vision realized.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pcm.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;windows-10-the-future-starts-now&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pcm.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;windows-10-the-future-starts-...</a>

I&#x27;m sticking with Windows 7 until Windows 15

ReactOS suddenly makes a lot of sense to me now!

Besides the fact that you can&#x27;t turn off automatic updates (which makes Windows little more than a zombie node in Microsoft&#x27;s vast botnet), the default setting is also to &quot;send updates to ... PCs on my local network, and PCs on the Internet.&quot; Similar for the defaults in Windows Defender.

All obtainable with a subpoena, I would imagine.<p>No way.

The only way to reliably opt out of Microsoft collecting your personal data at this point, is to opt out of the whole Microsoft experience. Everyone knows (or should know) that toggle switches are not guaranteed to do what their respective labels say they would.

As a Windows Insider that has helped Microsoft squash bugs the last few months you must realize that sending bug report data is ridiculously important. Especially on a rolling-release model that this has become.

Hijacking this thread - if anyone used the official media creation tool to get a x86_64 Professional ISO, can you please post MD5&#x2F;SHA1 hashes? Mine don&#x27;t match anything on google.

Had to go through the entire system and stop Win 10 from sending all my personal info to Microsoft! The need to stop trying to be Apple.

Everyone is ignoring the biggest problem: &quot;apps&quot; everywhere!<p>(this message was brought to you by someone who earns money through language)

Had to go through the entire Windows 10 and stop it from sending all my personal info to Microsoft!!!!! Stop trying to be APPLE!

Didn&#x27;t Microsoft run ads on Google collection personal information. Now they are doing the same!

Incredible, how does this all fit with Microsoft&#x27;s &#x27;Scroogled&#x27; campaign ?

Too much conspiracy, but how we all wish it was just theories.

No guarantee the switches do what they say.

I hope governments are starting to understand what they have gotten themselves into by using this crap. Microsoft should be banned from all public offices :D

What IS &quot;inking data&quot;, anyway?

Nice one pal.

&gt; <i>I am pretty surprised by the far-reaching data collection that Microsoft seems to want. But, I am even more surprised by the fact that the settings all default to incredibly intrusive.</i><p>I can&#x27;t see why anyone would be surprised anymore. This has been going on for years now.

I&#x27;m not sure, but I think Windows 8 had the same options and they were on by default too.

&quot;trusted partners&quot; including every single American intelligence agency and whatever despotic and totalitarian regime we happen to be supporting at any given moment.<p>I guess that &quot;free&quot; upgrade business model includes harvesting data globally to sell to surveillance state agencies through round-about ways &lt;<i>cough</i>&gt; palantir &lt;<i>cough</i>&gt;

Okay. Good to know. So, when I decide to upgrade from Windows XP, I will install the legal DVD I have of Windows 7 and stay with that for years!<p>No Windows 8, 10, etc. for me until Microsoft makes some fantastically strong and solid statements about compatibility with old software, security, and privacy.

Well, today was the day. I finally got my fill of this site.<p>Thanks for the memories HN, but this just isn&#x27;t worth it. I could have been coding. From now on I will be.<p>Adieu.

May I ask...to those who are so deeply opposed to sharing your personal data with corporations and their partners:<p>Let&#x27;s assume, worst case scenario -- you enable every single data sharing option on your Android phone as well as let&#x27;s say, Windows desktop. And you use chrome browser, logged in, etc. All the time.<p>Now, the question is: explain to me, what you expect to be the negative outcome and how it affects your daily life.<p>I am genuinely curious. Or is this just a fear of the unknown and projecting into the future all of the bad things that <i>may</i> happen (or also may not)?

You are worried your data is sent to MS and sold to advertisers? All your personal data has already been stolen by foreign hackers so why worry? Privacy is already dead. We would need to rethink an awful lot of things to get it back.

This looks like all the same sort of stuff Google defaults you into on Android. I mean, not that it&#x27;s any better because of that, but this is the state of things now. You&#x27;re not going to find better unless you install FOSS. Unless you&#x27;re ready to go full-in on one of the BSDs or a Linux-that-isn&#x27;t-Ubuntu, navigating the waters of figuring out how to get a phone that has all the features you want with such an OS, figuring out how to do all the work you need to do, then you&#x27;re in for a penny, in for a pound.<p>Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the FBI, NSA, CIA, DHS, they all have my data already. Thanks to OPM, the Russians and Chinese probably have my data now, too. What does it matter if Microsoft has it? They probably already have it. Maybe it&#x27;s even <i>better</i> to make sure <i>everyone</i> has my data, rather than allowing it to be used as a competitive advantage by one or a small set of corporations. Cat&#x27;s out of the bag. Horses have left the stable. Whatever other metaphors you want to throw in there.<p>So decide, and decide now: either go full-in on FOSS, or shut up and eat your cookie. Otherwise, this exercise hasn&#x27;t been about privacy, it&#x27;s been about anti-Bill-Gates-and-Steve-Ballmer-Microsoft sentiment.

Microsoft&#x27;s privacy policy reflects the fact that Microsoft has to comply with the most conservative interpretation of the most restrictive privacy regulations from the set of all privacy regulations found anywhere in the world. It amounts to &quot;Microsoft does not guarantee privacy.&quot; The reason is that Microsoft cannot make such a guarantee because of the diversity and strength of privacy regulations.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that strong privacy regulations are a bad thing or that Microsoft&#x27;s policy is a good thing. Just that Microsoft&#x27;s policy reflects reality where competitors and activists and politicians are inclined to use privacy regulations for purposes orthogonal to any actual concern about privacy. The connected world is full of caches and Microsoft does not control them. Users can do stupid things that Microsoft cannot prevent.<p>Agree with the terms and use Windows. Don&#x27;t use Windows if you disagree. The website hosting the blog runs google-analytics by default. It doesn&#x27;t ask my permission. It runs Disqus by default. It doesn&#x27;t ask my permission. The privacy badger ate too many cookies and died years ago. Microsoft is late to the wake.