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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

To play devils advocate here: when it's their own startup project, everybody is totally into analytics and data driven design. Heck, we even usually defer our analytics to a third party (Mixpanel, Google Analytics) that will allow them to form personal profiles aggregated over multiple vendors.

But when Microsoft wants to do the same kind of analytics we all swear by, then the big outrage starts and everybody is all up in arms.

Personally, I'm against tracking and I fought the powers that be in order to not get analytics into our products, but that's a battle I lost. So now I really feel like I'm in no position to complain about MS doing analytics when even my own stuff does it.

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Well it's easy enough to block Mixpanel, GA, etc. But details seem to be unclear on exactly how you block everything Windows does. During the technical preview, I noted that even the group policy settings to disable things like web search simply did not work - all my searches were still sent off.

MS has had Customer Improvement Programs for quite a while, but most of them were opt-in. The shift to not offering opt-out and making things deliberately vague and confusing is what people are upset about.

Also, just because many startups do bad things doesn't excuse Microsoft. Especially due to Microsoft's size and influence, "if you don't like it, don't use it" doesn't always apply like it might to startups.

> many startups do bad things

I'm sorry, do you think startups are morally obligated to not know how people use their services? Care to justify that position?

I view the increasing stance that people should be free with their privacy to be "bad". Third party analytics increase the perception that it's normal, common, OK, to-be-expected, etc. that your activity with one party should be liberally shared with others. Adding GA is probably a fairly minor offense, but I wouldn't call it a good or neutral thing, so it must be slightly bad eh? (I use GA; I don't like to, but it makes economic sense).

Startups do much worse though. See, for instance, apps that try to get every permission. Even if they don't use them, the fact that they ask for such permissions again instills that this is acceptable behaviour in society.

What you said, "know how people use their services" can be OK. A site doing its own analytics on data that users wouldn't reasonably expect to be private is fine (the user is already using the site, and it's fair to believe the site knows what they;re doing). Anything more invasive (in-app: web or otherwise) should get clear consent first. It's hard to give consent for e.g. GA - is that even a thing?

Windows "phoning home" for analytics introduces a new level of data collection. And most of the harm here is because MS has done so in a vague way, apparently with a broken opt-out (going off my Win10 usage and what others have said they've seen with the final release).

I think the Microsoft situation is different (due to the scale, expectations of their customers of several decades, and global dependence upon their operating system) and totally indefensible, but I agree with you. The web crowd should put their money where their mouths are and stop using external tracking services before they cast stones over this. Analytics are one thing, volunteering to be another node in Google's dragnet is another.

Dream on.

Most Windows users are non-technical users who don't read or understand EULAS and they aren't even aware that their personal life is recorded at every action they take. I'm all down for analytics where the user is fully aware of what data is transmited, when and how. Sadly that will never happen because every company is only concerned with their legal obligations and not moral ones.

The big difference for me is that the Google etc. is restricted to what I show my browser. Microsoft should drop the P in PC, because it's now nothing of the kind.

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