Microsoft Makes Windows 10 Automatic Spying Worse
forbes.com
forbes.com
The target user is not one that knows what this stuff means or at least doesn't care even if they do. "I want to be able to create this month's budget on Excel". Everything else is gibberish.
Nor should they. I upgraded my parents to use Android phones. Trying to explain what the permission system is was really challenging. "Write to External Storage" is not a statement that you can explain without mentioning the words SD card and internal storage and difference between them. So I have come to the conclusion that current software paradigms are too difficult to understand for anybody who doesn't do this for a living. I wish there was a platform that is midway between Apple's the user is dumb and Android's everybody is a tech-wizard approach.
Please don't confuse more control with privacy.
My last foray into Ubuntu and Mint (for more control) was a miserable failure on several levels, so I went back to Microsoft Windows.
There are many people that would like an alternative, but Mac OS and Linux aren't suitable (walled garden and stability issues). Having to hack around security concerns is still my preferred alternative at this time.
The Amiga was a great example of that: https://stiggyblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/workbench-v3_...
The desktop consisted of shortcuts you could put there, but also whatever media were currently inserted in the system. If you removed one, the icon vanished. If you inserted one, the icon disappeared.
Thus right from the start the user was trained to see this correlation.
Meanwhile on linux and all related OSes the connection is completely invisible unless you go looking, and insertable media are "however your flavor of OS does it", and windows systems hide them in "My Computer" and even in there show drive icons, not icons for the inserted storages.
But they all sooner or later have the same question.. "where's drive C:"?
It's not simple to replace 20 years of using a metaphors .. even today we keep using disk for "save" actions
There is a legitimate criticism if Microsoft re-enabled the service after the renaming for users who had turned it off under the old name. But that doesn't fit the narrative arc of Microsoft malfeasance. Tech journalism shouldn't be a debate team exercise. When it is, there are no winners and everybody walks away dumber.
"it resets many user preferences (including basics like your preferred web browser) if they weren’t Microsoft product/services as well as silently deleting third party system monitoring apps like: CPU-Z, speccy, 8gadgetpack, SpyBot, HWMonitor and more."
It took me an hour of messing with seeings and Powershell to get everything back to how I had it before the update.
I think I understand Microsoft's motivations though. They want everyone up to date, control third party applications that might lead to instabilities, and basically make Windows 10 as solid as possible. There is a lot of similarity in what Apple does. I trust, more or less, both companies.
try Settings (app) / Notifications / App Store / Allow Notification
I rarely give any app notification privileges.
I think that's why they did it, and why they've done similarly laccidental' things over the last couple of months.
All other reasons are secondary.
If you don't have it I'll wager you have automatic updates off.
Have a look for this one, I'm going to look for it on my work machine on Monday.