GameDVR: Is Windows 10 recording my screen, at all times, without permission?
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I've been asking this since 2000 or so: What extensive invasion of your privacy needs to happen for you to give up Windows? Will this latest revelation be the tipping point for you?
Users. Don't. Care. Computers and smartphones are devices most people use exclusively to put personal information onto the internet. Banking, social media, health care information, all of it. The battle isn't over -- it never even began.
This is why, now that I'm the BOFH, I force my politics on my users.
My company bans microsoft products connected to (W)LAN, and intentionally breaks our intranet sites on anything but Gecko or (Gtk/Qt)Webkit browsers. Chrome redirects to a blank web page with the word "no" on it, as does any browser identifying with a Microsoft OS on it. All outbound traffic is routed through a Tor proxy by default.
If they're too complacent to switch, I can stop their herpes from spreading to networks I control. The effect has been wider adoption of Firefox, and the occasional question about why Google is in Dutch.
Rather, users, don't really have a choice.
From personal experience, linux is still far from actually being user-friendly. And it's easy for me to compare: 1) I haven't had a blue screen on neither my, or my mother's laptop since XP SP2. 2) 6 months ago when I wanted to switch to Ubuntu I had my HDD suddenly die after an update. No mo trying for me.
Besides, these "clueless" users everybody imagines are not the ones making the choices. They resort to their kids, nephews, or that computer kid down the road to reinstall their Windows. And I am not that crazy yet to install linux on my mother's laptop. I bet it won't even work.
It basically enables a hotkey to activate screen recording.
So, it's not recording your screen all the time, without your permission? Even if it was, how is that data managed by Microsoft? That's a LOT of data...so it doesn't seem believable that MS would be that stupid.
Disclosure: I am not connected to Microsoft in any way (they'd never hire me), but I am pretty attached to my Windows system. I have used Ubuntu and Debian for a fair bit, and frankly, there are just too many rough edges. It annoyed me. Windows on the other hand, has just been getting smoother.
For me, the biggest reason why I couldn't stand Linux OSes was because I had trouble finding a PDF reader that did all the nice things Adobe Acrobat Professional does. I have to read through a lot of PDFs for work.
I also do a lot of scientific computation, but it is pretty OS agnostic as I am not tied to C when using Python+Numba(I am a huge Numba fan).
Appealing (but not something I use) "killer apps" like Vim or Emacs are also OS independent now, so yeah.
No motivation to go back to Linux.
Even if Microsoft was spying on me, I couldn't really care less, because I am a no-name nothing. Life's good.