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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Not wanting Ads I can understand - you've paid for Windows (and in some cases Surface hardware) and you don't want to be the product - but why do you dislike telemetry? I'd rather Microsoft know what crashes the OS (and why apps die) in the real world and fix it.

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Because telemetry is potentially not only the core dumps and performance metrics, but also all sorts of potentially sensitive information - like a data derived from the user input (keyboard , voice or pen - this data is said to be anonymized but AFAIK no one had audited this) or list of installed applications. Knowing that something is crashing or performing badly is one thing, knowing what I'm doing with my computer is another.

Telemetry can be done right by letting end-user to see an example of the data that's going to be sent and then also audit the actual reports that were sent. Transcribed into a human-readable format with some comments about what the values mean - I can see the binary data myself, thanks. And a way to opt out if the data is found to be actually sensitive.

Basically, an opt-out switch and "sure, but give me a full transparency report" mode that a "power user" can optionally access if they happen to care. This is rarely the case, and not the case with Windows.

While I am (probably) just as against this kind of opaque bulk data aggregation, there is an argument to be made that they could be analyzing the data you provide on their end and storing the result (e.g. "how many users did X" is not a question you could anonymize on the end user machine, but they still might discard anything other than perhaps a hash to prevent duplicates, and thereby not be able to answer the question of who said what later.)

I agree with the desire for complete transparency in data shared, but eventually this will run afoul of a number of practices which rely on cat-and-mouse games where one side doesn't have complete information (an obvious example being precisely what sorts of data Windows Defender uses/sends for malware found by heuristic, presuming it doesn't just ship the entire binary off), to say nothing of the conspiracy theories that would arise every time they ever added some kind of data collection.

I don't have a good answer for this friction in general - complete transparency would only fly until a piece of malware that circumvented every heuristic and strict rule caused a major incident, whereas nearly complete opacity is where we are now.

(There's also the conflict of their lack of recurring revenue for Windows 10, which is why I'd anticipate them eventually at least floating the option to disable the "end user data as payment" harvesting for an annual fee, but...)

Except the "new Microsoft" has publicly lamented the fact that they aren't capturing the same personal information for targeted advertising that Google and Facebook were. They've also stated that Windows 10 would "fix" that. Telemetry that captures keystrokes and pumps line-in audio back to home base was the way to do this.

Citation please

http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-microsoft-inter...

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar16/index.html

https://www.fastcompany.com/3064030/satya-nadella-on-microso...

I couldn't find the older articles about how Ballmer was complaining that they were missing out on the personal data gold rush that Google and Facebook were experiencing.

Those are interesting links but they don't support your assertion that Microsoft's big envy is for the kind of ad targeting data FB and google posses. The only related content I saw were the mentions of Cortana, and Cortana is not just a terrible way to chase advertising dollars, it's actually a way to unseat Google's dominance in tech precisely because it breaks the viability of advertising as a business.

Google's entire business is built around selling the presentation of unwanted information around the organic content you want. That works great in a visual medium where the extra information requires no more of your time and only minimally more of your attention. Alexa and Cortana and Siri shift that interaction to audio where it becomes incredibly difficult to insert even a tiny fraction of the surrounding ad content search engines used to deliver visually. Alexa and Cortana and Siri break google's business model because they break the ability to spam customers with ancillary information, and they can do that because neither Amazon nor Apple nor Microsoft derive the bulk of their revenues from ad sales. This is a battle of business models, not a quest for the other guy's business model.

So yes, Microsoft is building Cortana, and no, Cortana isn't about becoming an advertising powerhouse it's about blocking their two ad-fueled competitors (the best discussion I'm aware of of google's efforts to fight back against this agent-driven threat to their ad-based business model is [0] )

[0] https://stratechery.com/2016/google-and-the-limits-of-strate...

Keylogger I recall hearing about for the pre-release versions, but audio capture is new to me.

Is there an article where I can read more about that?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro...

There were earlier articles that talked about the frequency of audio dumps (every 30 minutes) but I wouldn't call them as reliable sources as Ars or Microsoft.

Do you want potentially sensitive information leaving your machine? That's basically the counterargument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Error_Reporting#Privac...

There are two main arguments:

- You can't disable telemetry completey. Some people want it, some don't. Let the user decide.

- Microsoft does collect an insane amount of data.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/basic...

> You can't disable telemetry completey. Some people want it, some don't. Let the user decide.

I would be curious how many users want telemetry sent to Microsoft. It seems the two largest buckets, by far, would be those who don't care and those who don't want it.

I want your (all yalls) telemetry data sent to Microsoft, so my Windows crashes less. As an aggregate, the worlds telemetry data has an extremely positive impact on me.

The problem with opt in is that most people, where most crashes occur, would never read what the prompt says asking them to send the data, they would just press the x in the corner because a dialog box popped up they didnt ask for. "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."

> The problem with opt in is that most people, where most crashes occur, would never read what the prompt says asking them to send the data, they would just press the x in the corner because a dialog box popped up they didnt ask for. "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."

You're describing a UX issue with the worst possible way this could be implemented. What chafes me is not that I'm not asked for permission for every crash report, but that I don't have the option to disable crash reports at all.

So would pressing the x mean that the user agreed to this? If it's unclear, I'm drawing that conclusion from all those Windows 10 upgrades where that were the case.

maybe if the buttons said "Contribute Nothing" and "Do the Right Thing"

> "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."

That's right, because all these unsolicited prompts and notifications are a waste of people's valuable time. A well-designed OS should aggressively keep quiet, stay out of the way, and err on the side of user privacy.

Your Windows crashing is an issue strictly between you, Microsoft, and the makers of whatever software and hardware you were using when the crash occurred. Absolutely nothing to do with anybody else.

> I want your (all yalls) telemetry data sent to Microsoft, so my Windows crashes less.

I want your data sent to Microsoft too, for the same reason. I don't want my data sent to Microsoft, though.

Telemetry is this close to being apparatus for spying; a court order (secret or otherwise) could strip whatever anonymization MS is doing, say, for specific IPs or even whole regions by geography. Poof: keystrokes in real-time, available to state actors. Wouldn't that be grand?

Developed capacity may not equal intent, but if you can be ordered to do secret work and make it so anyway, the distinction is irrelevant.

If a court order could do that, why do you think they couldn't just enable it remotely too?

Which is why, if you really care about privacy, you can't trust software you can't audit.

They could, but it would be possible for you to notice, by looking at network traffic.

Maybe they should go back to good old days of Windows XP when they've asked if I want to send them crash report.

There is nothing wrong with telemetry - if it's opt-in. That's all.

That's exactly right - I'm happy to let my OS provider know when things break with the hopes that they fix them, but sometimes I don't want to do that, and I'd rather be asked every time or have a global setting to decide than be defaulted to opt-in.

I think it needs to be opt out. Most users AREN'T power users. They want their computer to work consistently, like an appliance. That requires that the vendor has information about the status of the device.

As long as you're clearly informed about what kind of information it's collecting and you can turn it off (and ideally tune it) it's fine with me.

The opt in piece is important because you need large amounts of data to detect emerging issues. It lets you distinguish between flukes and trends. This enables the quality of service that the user expects.

Why does working consistently like an appliance require the OS provider to know the state of your device at all times? Our appliances have functioned well for decades without this capability and clearly don't need this senseless data collection for the sake of data hoarding. Yet every manufacturer of every product is jamming it in wherever they can. Fridges, cars, dildos, you name it, it's got telemetry or people trying to implement it.

It is simple, data is becoming worth something because you now have the ability to analyze all the data you could ever collect. And so, everybody naturally jumps on the wagon because of the inherent profit motive.

If a computer was an appliance, you would buy it and it would never need to phone home. Now we both know that there is some need for updates and it might therefore be a good idea to classify computers as something other than appliances.

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