Fix Windows 10
fix10.isleaked.com
fix10.isleaked.com
MS should have realized by now that people don't quite trust them with this stuff, and they should have make it clear at the outset that they are never going to use this data for "sharing with their partners" or any purpose other than explicitly as a signal for improving specific Windows features.
They used legal language that allows them much more latitude than what they require. This is most likely intentional (probably for future competition with Google), but IMO they should have gone with a very narrow data use policy.
It's the same trap that people fall in to when site terms of use ask for worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable license to content that you post. Yeah, that sounds like it's a horrible nastyness, but from a legal point of view that wording is a safety net for the company, not an attempt to claim actual rights over contributed content.
MS has completely failed to control the message here, and everyone's working themselves into a groupthink riot, just like they did over the Ok Google binary blob nonsense.
Not everyone with a different opinion to you is incapable of forming their own conclusions, or susceptible to groupthink.
Is Bruce Schneier also a victim of this 'nonsense'?
It's time to change for the Microsoft CEO, better release an early 10.1 than burn the Windows brand for generations.
I'm not saying it isn't important or a big deal. But- as best I can tell, this is a sideshow compared to some of the offenses that have come before, and in the greater public it seems most people don't even know, let alone care.
MS may reverse things if they act fast, but Windows is mainly a corporation thing (in revenue, if not volume), and corporations care about information security (in a very incompetent way, but they do care). If Windows gets the fame of sending all your data abroad, it will suffer.
- Blocking malicious sites.
- Page prediction.
- Improving typing prediction.
- Finding open hotspots and automatic sharing of network credentials with contacts.
- Cortana.
- Search suggestions.
Multiple of these are also already done by Google and Apple, but the riots are much smaller. So, it's probably a mixture of: bad wording, spreading privacy options across too many configuration screens, and all that fuelled by some good old Microsoft hatred (I can't remember people being quite as upset about Android or iOS).
I think everyone would be better off if one of the first configuration steps would give three choices:
1. Protect my privacy completely. No data is sent at all to Microsoft.
2. Only send anonymized data to Microsoft. Data is used in a non-identifiable manner, enables some features such as blocking malicious websites and search suggestions.
3. Send useful data about me to Microsoft. Sends non-anonymous data to Microsoft to tailor Cortana and Windows to your needs. Data is not used for advertising purposes or given to third parties.
Simple to understand and everyone can make pick their own trade-off.
- non-optional forced auto updates (except on Enterprise "long term servicing branch" edition)
Give the user the choice. Compare it to iOS, Android, OSX, Linux everywhere the user has the choice to stop the auto-update, often for important reasons no one thought before.
Exactly, which is why Microsoft and enterprise IT like to control the updates. If they can't control the updates, they can't trust the computer!
Unpatched, dated, or even EoL OS versions has been a big problem for a long time, and it's arguably even more serious of an issue than dated versions of Chrome.
You want that control for yourself, and I can relate to that, but 99% of users cannot be trusted with that control which is why this happened.
Neither enterprise IT nor consumers can control it, do you get it? Only with the very expensive "Enterprise Long Term Servicing Branch" License, which only a small group of large corporations will be able to license. No other operating system exists that behave in such a way. It's a "Windows as a Service", but many still want a traditional onprimise Windows, the same goes for all other Microsoft software incl. Office and Sharepoint.
"The windows" is her friend, and she's relatively tech savvy for a person of her generation.
Heck, people my mothers generation would not think to do this.
Heck, even my brother would not think to do this, or to look for this. If it's not a single place, if you have to open the command line (on windows) then the ability for a reasonable user to gain privacy is nonexistant.
the option might as well be a toggle switch in the middle of Tanzia, it will be noticed all the same.
Normal people don't want to disable their OS.
Its not a grammatical error (grammatically, its basically identical to the "could not" form, since "could" and "could not" are usable in the exact same grammatical positions.) There is a semantic mismatch between the individual terms taken in isolation and the idiomatic meaning of the phrase, but this is not uncommon in idiomatic phrases (one can view it as something like "[x] could (in theory, though it is unlikely in practice) care less.")
/s
She needs the anti-phishing filter, the anti-malicious app & URL filter, and will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.
You can argue if certain things help your "grandmother" (e.g. telemetry, advertiser IDs, etc) but this seems like to throws the baby out with the bathwater.
PS - Windows 10's defaults could be better. But this takes it to the other extreme, disabling legitimately useful functionality (in particular security focused functionality).
Have you ever had a grandma? My grandma literally plays solitaire and checks her email, that's it. She wants nothing to do with cortana.
I set my grandma up with Ubuntu and set the homepage of firefox to her email. I've never had a problem.
To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games").
Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.
Apple saves Siri's audio for 2 years for example... not sure what Microsoft's policy is on this...
Please enlighten the HN crowd and provide a reference for this claim.
I think you're going to need to provide some evidence to support that. It is not intuitively obvious in the slightest, especially given how frequently Cortana/Siri/GoogleNow trip up even with a data center backing them.
Seriously, if processing locally was so easy but they still wanted to steal all your data, they would crunch it locally & give results, and silently ship off the recording to an archive in parallel. Local processing is cheaper for them (bandwidth, compute) and faster for you.
The added advantage of doing this is that you can block all traffic associated with Microsoft's user tracking servers, which should work (as long as Microsoft don't switch the server name in use).
Either that or recommend avoiding the Windows 10 upgrade. Windows 7 in particular should be sticking around for quite a while yet.
This is a game people are going to lose. If MS cared about privacy this wouldn't have happened in the first place. Just don't use Windows. Use your favourite Linux distribution.
http://www.informationweek.com/microsoft-updates-windows-wit...
osX invented all this. MS is just catching up. and apple don't even allow you to disable things.
android? chrome alone sends more info than whole windows 10+edge.
now, you could say Linux. but sadly your grand mother has no publicly available product she can buy with that OS.
then clicked the laptops link.
then clicked every single one of the models and clicked customize.
every single one of the options were Windows 7, 8, 10. Only.
did you manage to go from that page to any actual product you could just enter your credit card and receive with ubuntu?
PS: i should tell you that i'm not being pessimistic. just realistic. My current personal computer is an Asus eeepc-1000, from 2007 or so. the very first netbook with SSD that shipped with linux. i replaced the asus distro garbage with debian right away, but i got it with linux for the meaning of it.
Also, there are at least a couple of "publicly available" products one could buy preloaded with Linux. Even Dell has an offering: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd
Also compared to windows, I don't need to check that they installed some IncrediBar software which is changing the homepage all the time, this is much better for me. Also I don't know how to explain that but the i18n is incredible compared to Windows and it's much more translated even in system parts, there is no english words to scare away my parents. It just feels more pure in terms of translation.
Most of these settings are all in the same place, right where you set up the OS.
In my opinion, none of them have to be off. I understand why they're being collected, and I don't mind that information being collected, and I like the things like the predictions as features.
But I do appreciate that they can be turned off. Another OS might just add those things but not make them something you could opt out of at all.
I mean, even Ubuntu went and sent all of your search data to Amazon by default for a while without any simple way to opt out of it, which to me is worse than Microsoft itself collecting Cortana data with the ability to turn the option off at install time.
But the thing about allowing people to choose to turn those features off (or even on) means that they're aware that they're there, while other people can just slip them in as a tiny line somewhere in the privacy policy and not allow you to configure those settings at all.
Yes. Sometimes doing the right thing to protect your rights and the rights of others requires sacrifice. Freedom is not always free (as in beer).
As long as you insist that any potential alternative have the same features, you might as well give up. The incumbent can always create and market a new "feature" guaranteeing any alternative is always playing catch-up.
As time goes on, the lock-in increases and the cost of change becomes more expensive. Do you want to pay this cost now. or do you want to pay an even higher cost in the future after Microsoft - emboldened by the profits from selling user data to their "partners" - decides to make the spying even more invasive?
Do you even want to own a General Purpose Computer? You better make a decision quickly; when Intel's SGX instructions become widespread, it will be next to impossible to disable these "important security features".
I thought I was more or less following the development of PC hardware, but I never heard of this one, and it's not very new already. Wikipedia article [1] on the subject is surprisingly concise, and only quotes Intel homepage on the subject.
Do you have any pointers to independent discussion or analysis of this technology? As with all such new technologies, it might require more than just reading its name or manufacturer's description to understand its implications: like e.g. with Trusted Execution Technology, it takes some research to form an opinion: is it actually about me, the computer's user, or someone else who is going to trust this computer?
even wired, which usually drink the apple cool aid, reported on it during Yosemite. though the app store reporting is mostly ignored by non geeks, so search deeper for that
I was pretty sure that I had disabled all my Mac's and iPad's "phone home" behaviours. (Of course, technically, iPad and iPhone are iOS, not OS X.) There are certainly a lot of dials to twiddle, but I thought that I'd hit them all and had found a reasonable amount of privacy (at considerable expense of functionality). What are the non-disable-able features?
http://9to5google.com/2013/11/11/google-tracking-your-store-...
If you disable it, Google Now stops working.
Or with Chromebooks, where everything is forced to be stored in Google's cloud with very paltry storage like 32GB and 64GB even in high end Pixels.
I somehow don't see the outrage on HN about things like physical store visits being tracked by default on Android devices.
The NSA is making sure no one gets too outraged. You're allowed to get a little upset about windows, seeing as no matter how mad people get, Windows will still be a huge part of tech infrastructure --it won't go away--, and it also placates the masses, it makes them feel like they're rising up and accomplishing something and that they're "right". In the end the NSA is going to spy on you whether you want it or not. There is no opt-out.
I agree with you. I just find it curious why tech forums like this one and others appear to go gung-ho whenever something negative is mentioned about MS/Windows but same or worse privacy violations by other companies in software that is very widely used don't seem to trigger the same reaction.
Yes, your Chrome OS settings are backed up to Google's cloud, but you can always set an encryption passphrase separate from your Google password so that Google can't decrypt your settings.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/file-system-for-sm...
The terms of service allow them to mine all your documents etc. for keywords once it's in their cloud. Otherwise why would they sell Chromebooks at or below cost.
The difference here is that people using Windows in the past did have an expectation of privacy, which is no longer the case. Also, privacy is being retroactively removed.
At the end of the day, it is their product and they can do whatever they want with it. People are free to migrate away to Linux.
ReactOS is nowhere near usable as an everyday operating system; the site you linked to even says: ReactOS 0.3.17 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is recommended only for evaluation and testing purposes.
They need more developers and more money to get out of the alpha phase and into the beta phase.
In all honesty Linux + WINE runs more Windows apps than ReactOS currently does right now. Just get Play On Linux to help configure stuff: https://www.playonlinux.com/
If you don't want a Linux distro but want some alternative OS that is more finished that ReactOS try:
HaikuOS is a BeOS rewrite, it is written to be API compatible with the old BeOS versions.
AROS is written to be API compatible with AmigaOS 3.X, got support from Amiga Inc and they even used parts of AROS source code for the latest AmigaOS. They even ported it to 68K Amigas with a new Kickstart ROM replacement.
Haiku and AROS won't run Windows programs, but you can run them in virtual machines and use the software that is available for them.
I am waiting for ReactOS Server where they bundle a SAMBA server, Web Server, Email Server, so it can be a free Windows Server clone and install on Virtual Machines so it has a lower memory footprint than Windows Server. But Microsoft has made Windows Server Core to run with less memory.
American internet speeds suck enough without Microsoft grabbing some for itself.
> Windows Defender
They seemed to be able to improve their services before. In fact, I think that's what a Security Researchers job is. MS has several of them.
> handwriting and voice recognition
Neither of which apply to my desktop, so why do I have to give them any information.
Microsoft could have saved a lot of face simply by making all this opt in and off by default.
Which is why you should only have to download updates once for your entire network and not per device and why you shouldn't waste bandwidth on failed partial updates. This feature fixes both of these issues.
>They seemed to be able to improve their services before. In fact, I think that's what a Security Researchers job is. MS has several of them
I'm a software developer. My job is to write bug free code. My job would be a lot harder if I couldn't get any debug information from my testers or users. Just because it is possible to do a job without certain information, doesn't mean it is a good idea to intentionally withhold that information.
>Neither of which apply to my desktop, so why do I have to give them any information.
If you don't use voice or ink, why are you worried about sharing your voice and ink data with Microsoft?
>Microsoft could have saved a lot of face simply by making all this opt in and off by default.
Because most of these features would have never been turned on by the user. What good is a security setting that is supposed to protect unskilled computer users if it requires in depth knowledge of the OS to turn on in the first place?
For what it's worth, I don't think this is a fair assessment. Sure, with ink data, you actually need a tablet or some kind of input device in order for Microsoft to collect and send data. But almost every laptop or off-the-shelf computer nowadays comes with a microphone, and they will be more ubiquitous now that voice recognition and input is becoming more accepted by the general populace.
The problem then, is that the microphone is _always_ on, and could potentially send _everything_ you say, or could listen in at any given moment. The problem is that with voice data, the feature 1) can't be inspected and 2) will send data, even if you never use the service. Most important here is the latter point: I shouldn't be subject to the terms and conditions of using a service if I am not using a service. By not agreeing to the terms and conditions, I don't get to use the service (Cortana). If I'm fine with that, and don't want to use that service, then the terms and conditions of my data being sent to Microsoft should not apply to me (i.e. my data should not be sent).
Doing otherwise is shady behaviour, regardless of your opinion on the usefulness or nefariousness of the feature in question.
There is ONE Windows machine on my network, so there are no other Windows machines to share updates with. There are a tonne on the internet though, I don't care about sharing with them.
> My job would be a lot harder
It's too bad it was impossible to do before Microsoft was spying on its users. Oh wait, it wasn't.
> If you don't use voice or ink, why are you worried about sharing your voice and ink data with Microsoft?
I don't want to send anything to Microsoft.
> Because most of these features would have never been turned on by the user.
There is a reason for that, people don't want it.
> What good is a security setting ...
These are not security settings. The security comes from turning them off.
This sounds uncomfortably like "if you don't have anything to hide …".
Before what? These are no new features.
Exactly by not sharing any information with MS. If they didn't assume that people wanted to share their private information (they don't), they'd create software with proper architecture that doesn't need to connect to the could to do simple things like handwriting analysis and voice recognition.
I honestly can't tell if you actually believe what you are saying, or are just making a really badly told joke.
By opt-in approach and full transparency on what data's sent.
Seriously, ask me "hey, can you help us?", provide an option to let me see what data exactly was, being and will be sent (NOT some multi-page legalese with notice that everything in there could change at company's discretion) - and unless you're sending something I really don't want to share (like actual raw texts I typed instead of processed statistical data), you're very likely to have my help. And, given the current situation, even praise the approach and suggest other to help the noble intent.
There's a giant difference between this and a pre-installed black box that sends some data which contents I don't even know.
Which works perhaps twice in the corporate world before you're thrown out on the street.
In the realm of public opinion sometimes even once is enough to wreck a brand.
For the first time ever I have non-tech colleagues asking me about Linux.
The more common phrase is easier rather than better. (Which is why the initialism form is EAFP rather than BAFP.)
And it is easier. Also, however, more prone to adverse consequences when the answer to what you ask is "no".
Obviously, they're machine-encoded (binary or XML), so the representation should be modified a bit to be more human-readable.
I don't care that I won't know what most of metrics mean exactly ("magic mumbo-jumbo average time: 0.42us" or some hard-to-read probability matrices), but as far as I can see no raw personal data is being leaked out (my private file information, raw texts typed on keyboard, screenshots - this sort of stuff) it's probably OK. The important part is not me understanding the data sent, but the transparency about the program.
Handwriting and voice recognition software have both been available for decades, and have improved considerably over most of that time without most end-users being required to share data back with the software makers (in many cases, without most users even having a mechanism available to do so.)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ#Why_would_I_want_to...
Can't get more orange than Arch, for the sake of that comparison!
1. Install an AOSP ROM without the proprietary Google Apps or Google Play Services.
2. Install the F-Droid market to download whatever programs you like.
3. Enjoy using an Android phone without the anti-privacy Google tracking.
1. Turn off every Windows feature mentioned in this article.
Installing an AOSP ROM is an order of magnitude harder than disabling the privacy-concerning settings in Windows considering that you probably would need to extract (or write your own) drivers from the vendor-customized ROM.
I'm perfectly content using only the apps available in F-Droid, and have been for years.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Why should I disable that? What does it do? My understanding is that it's only statistics on data usage, which I find useful?
If cortana wants to automatically recommend appointments from emails? Guess what? She has to read your emails.
If you want to be blocked from downloading malware? Guess what? You have to check with a central db first.
etc
Apple, Google devices etc have had this stuff on for ages.
Or it could download the db and do the checks locally. There wouldn't be privacy concerns about MS knowing which sites one's browsing.
[0] https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/developers_guide...
Which is - as far as I know - is very different from how Windows anti-malware system works. At least I think I saw a network requests from Windows 8 machine when "untrusted" applications (.exe) were started.
I am sure the technologists at both Google and Microsoft has the best of intentions with their creations, the question is what happens when a TLA or similar comes knocking.
Shall we turn siri off by default?
"Malware databases can exist locally" - You still have to download, and upload definitions. This is what windows defender does. People still complain about that.
It's not that I'm not concerned about privacy. It's the hypocritical nature of people. It only becomes a big issue when Microsoft does it. Anyone else, very little complaints.
In one case, you download the whole database.
In the other case, you essentially tell the company "hey, I’m visiting website with hash 12345, is that bad?".
This can be abused. Google could with it create a database of everyone who visit, say, pornhub.com, for example, by logging everyone who visits a page with the same hash as pornhub.com
Same with file-based malware databases:
You tell it "I have the file with hash 12345, is it bad?" And, if Google - or the NSA, CIA, FBI, whatever – want to get a list of everyone who has that file, they just ask the database provider to log everyone who checks that hash against the database, then go to the ISP to get the real name of the owner of that IP, and then SWAT the person.
This is very much a possible risk.
When I want to interact with the internet, I use a browser. This browser is managed by many extensions that cut down on the information that is being sent about me. I do not want my operating system to talk to the internet without asking me.
cough, she = it, read = process
"She"
Do you want your machine to send some information, derived from your personal data, at third-party discretion - without you knowing what exactly is being sent?
No undo function, but you can choose between disabling or permanently removing tracking features.
It only removes the most "controversial" features of the OS (the "keylogger" part), but it may be of interest for those who still want some features, like everything related to security and/or the cloud.
Maybe it can serve as a basis for a more advanced software which will offer more cleaning options. Or maybe such a software already exists (I didn't search much).
This is why I consider an ad-blocker part of any standard security suite.
I say "ads" because while the thing was a obvious (to me) scam, it came while browsing Facebook of all places. As such, the only way i could see it happen was via the Facebook advertisement system.
Disabling uploads to other external machines does make sense to me, though.
you should recheck, the updates are still automatic
the only thing you're advised to disable here are the reports to microsoft about your installed updates/software and P2P updates
This simple change makes Ubuntu very fast again.
Why? Well, mainly because we do not have the time and cannot afford the risk of dealing with and navigating through a security and privacy gauntlet.
We need an operating system, not Facebook, running our systems. Before anyone suggests it's no big deal please consider the idea that, when it comes to an OS used in a business/professional context privacy must be a non-negotiable default.
If Windows 10 had a single "Private Mode" switch that turned off all data leaks and monitoring it would be fantastic.
Some might suggest it isn't a big deal because it is annonymized data. The fact that a question exists means we have a problem. It's that simple. And, yes, some of it is FUD.
Suggesting a change to another OS simply isn't reasonable. For one thing, in our case we have a number of engineering applications that will only run on Windows, and that is the case for many professional users.
Instead of trying to discover and disable each confidentiality threat in the consumer version, the best solution probably is to obtain of that corporate version. Likely you also need to read up on how to configure those featues on TechNet, but generally Microsoft's documentation is complete (if sometimes difficult).
Also, it should be emphasized that providing options to disable privacy-invasive features doesn't justify invading the privacy of the non-tech savvy people, who cannot disable privacy-invasive functionalities.
As someone who havn't used Windows for a long time, can't you just create a PowerShell script to do all these things?
• 10 just came out.
• The authors possibly want to show just how complicated and arduous it is to disable this utter disrespect of user privacy, thus teaching the users that all these screens and settings amount to a so-called dark pattern (assuming the best case).
――――
I advise you to omit "uhm" from your online forum posts. It comes across as condescending because it makes it sound like you think your conversation partners are morons.
...sorry, it had to be said :)
Which sends search queries via “Spotlight Suggestions” and “Bing Web Searches” by default?
>Or Ubuntu
Which sends all your search queries to Canonical by default (via the shopping lens)?
The Ubuntu thing is opt-in, not opt-out in recent versions.
Both are simple changes and not nearly the same scope as W10's abuses.
Apple isn't limited to collected data just about those two things though. The fact is, Apple's OSs send, by default, a lot of data about you. It knows a lot about you, and by default, can do a lot of what people are afraid Microsoft can do.
If Windows 10's privacy issues are an issue with you, Apple is not an alternative in the slightest.
However, on Windows the start menu search is actually useful to me, and I use it regularly.
Now we need instructions for iOS and Android...No clue about OSX though.
I understand that Mac and Ubuntu both send stuff back home but the amount of things you have to do on a Windows machine to disable this just seems really hefty compared to a Mac or better yet Ubuntu machine (or some breed of Linux)
The fact that the OS ships with a subscription-based freemium app with ads [EDIT: that used to be free] is, for many people, that canary.
Shutting off cloud-based protection in Defender is equally stupid. Now you're not getting instant and up to date virus definitions from the cloud-based system of honey pots, third party hashes, etc. All you have then is day or days old virus defs that are pretty much useless against modern polymorphic threats.
I really hate it when people purposely conflate security and privacy to win political points. None of the above is controversial and if you run any AV or use any browser, you're already doing this and you didn't have a problem with it before. I think its pretty clear that the person who made this list just found all the sliders for 'no' and doesn't realize what he's doing from a security perspective. If you use Windows, you should be using all the security features you possibly can (on top of running behind a router doing IPS/IDS and making sure to use a standard non-admin account - the UAC fails in many places limited standard users don't). Signed, a Windows sysadmin.
edit: really downvotes? Telling people to disable security features in an OS shouldnt be applauded, especially on a tech forum. This is "grandpa" level IT advice here.
It just seems the suits on high think they know better than the rest of us and that's a troubling attitude. What if they think that end-to-end encryption isn't a good thing and that they need to force us "naughty children" to not use it? Well there goes your enterprise customers who have to use said encryption to secure work stations from industrial espionage.
I do agree that Smartscreen is in a silly place, but because MS now uses it for not only sites but MS Store links, it kinda makes sense to move it out of the browser and into a more general place. Sadly, links like these guides get everywhere on the internet. Lots of people are now going to be at risk at easily avoided malware and phishing attempts because of his laziness and stupidity.
In a couple months we'll have articles about "Why is Windows 10 getting so much malware?" Gee maybe because everyone disabled the security features in an angry privacy fit without considering the consequences or thinking through the problem? The same way geeks freaked out when the UAC in Vista was revealed and disabled it, along with the security layer it provides.
Also, I don't think Defender's cloud-based protection has anything to do with updates. These are delivered via WU; I think it's more to do with informing Microsoft about detection or suspicious files so they can be analysed.
(Not voted either way)
Edit: I really wish people would say why they downvote. Otherwise I have no idea what you disagree with or whether you think what I've written is factually incorrect.
"Get better, faster protection by sending Microsoft information about potential security problems Windows Defender finds"
The 'Privacy Statement' underneath links here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-privacy-s... (and yes, this was a Windows 8.1 -> 10 upgrade, not a tech preview install).
Under 'Data We Collect', the third bullet point:
"when you open a file, we may collect information about the file, the application used to open the file, and how long it takes to use it for purposes such as improving performance (e.g. to help retrieve documents more quickly)"
Note, I have 'Cloud-based protection' disabled and I'm still getting (near daily) definition updates, so the two definitely are not related.
As for the security argument, smartscreen only works in IE, so for those of use who don't want any of that turned on, and use FF (instead of chrome), where we download the blacklist instead of sending it outside our network, we can still maintain the same level of security while adding a layer to our privacy.
The same for cloud based Defender. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to turn it off if I have an approriate replacement that protects my privacy.
Which also means you are wrong when you say "if you run any AV or use any browser, you're already doing this". Nope, not at all, and either you are unaware of what you speak of or you are being disingenuous.
Your AV is doing exactly what Smartscreen does and so do many security products. Its a common feature, where are the privacy guides for that? Oh right, there's a double standard for MS.
Also, the author didn't disable Defender because he is using a different AV. He left it on and just disabled the cloud definitions feature, meaning he's not going to be up-to-date on definitions. Cloud defs are a bit different than what you get via WU. Its a dynamic list of suspicious hashes that's constantly being updated via honeypots and such. The author clearly does not understand what he is recommending.
"so do many security products. Its a common feature" That also is why I don't use those products, and many others would agree.
"where are the privacy guides for that?" I don't know, but are you trying to pretend there are none? If you are asking did you even do a couple of searches? I doubt it.
"Oh right, there's a double standard for MS." Nope, same standard for all things. I don't like it if you send any of my or my computers info to servers without my knowledge of the content or purpose and I explicitly approve.
"Also, the author didn't disable Defender because he is using a different AV. He left it on and just disabled the cloud definitions feature, meaning he's not going to be up-to-date on definitions."
Once again... wrong. The cloud feature is for sending info about what is on your computer to MS so they can use it to update the definitions, it does not provide the definitions itself.
"Cloud defs are a bit different than what you get via WU. Its a dynamic list of suspicious hashes" if this is true, then I would be wrong on the previous section, but I have seen no documentation that specifies this. Care to provide a source for this info?