What a surprise! Microsoft villianised over the decades seems to be better than Google and Facebook. This brings us to the question. Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
I tried to call them about it a month ago and they hung up on me. The one computer in my house running windows is still blocked with this popup.
[1]: https://blogs.windows.com/business/2016/09/01/windows-10-ent...
[2]: https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-enterprise-e3-from-cd...
The won't sell it to you. I asked about it a Microsoft store and they had no way of selling it to me.
All my important machines run operating systems that do not have spyware built-in.
First of all, Windows 10 is constantly stealing your personal info. To an extent not even possible to a website like Facebook since websites don't have direct access to your hardware. Some of the things they collect are:
- User contacts
- Calendar data
- Location data
- Keyboard input (keylogger)
- Microphone input (wiretap)
- Local files
- Installed programs
- How long you interact with programs
- Browser history
Have you ever read their 45 page policy document? It's chock full of goodies like:
>“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”
Fun. If you want to disable this, you have to go through 13 pages of settings in the general settings menu, disable settings through their dumb cortana thing, go to an external website to disable more settings and sign up for a Microsoft account (which requires giving Microsoft your phone number). And these preferences can be magically reset by Microsoft whenever they feel like it.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-priva...
>3. This is the crucial one, and so fundamental to Windows 10’s tracking that Microsoft have stuck the setting on an external website, which they say is so that it’s on one easy dashboard, but I find it hard not to wonder if it’s in the hope that we don’t easily stumble across it while browsing Windows 10’s own Privacy menus. Said website is colourful and cheerful and can play a video at you talking about how wonderful targeted advertising is. Ignore the bumf and instead go directly here and set both options to Off. It’s the innocuous-sounding “Personalised ads wherever I use my Microsoft account” which is the likely root of all this, because having that on means Windows 10 itself becomes a hub for targeted ads. You’ll probably have set up Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, because it heavily encourages you to do so with talk of synchronised files and settings and a OneDrive cloud account during installation, but this means the OS is signed into that account all the time. As a result, Windows 10 itself has it spyglasses on, not just apps or pages that you’re signed into with your MS account. I notice that every time I go back to that page, the “Personalised ads in this browser” setting has silently turned itself back on again. This is concerning
Oh yeah, and updates can completely reset these settings, making all that effort pointless.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-settings-must-check-windows-...
>Recently, a very big update to Windows 10 was released, which brought with it some nice improvements. But what was not publicized in Microsoft’s fanfare was that the update very quietly reset your privacy settings, and reset the default apps back to Windows Store apps. Gee thanks Redmond.
Anyone who still uses Windows 10 in this day in age is a sucker. And anyone who believes these deluge of green accounts shilling for Microsoft is a double sucker.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
1. Microsoft 2. Google 3. Chinese IP cameras
Among these, Microsoft is the most scary. Then Google.
They might not be collecting as much as Facebook and Google but god damn they are trying.
A villian doesn't become virtuous just because someone even worse turns up.
The criticism of Microsoft a few decades ago was in relation to Apple, OS/2, BeOS, Linux/BSD/etc. and I'm pretty sure those which still exist are still less villianous than Microsoft. Note that Apple is still villianous, but rather than just extorting their users directly, they prefer to extort everyone via massive tax avoidance.
> Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
I make regular payments to the Free Software Foundation, Open Rights Group, Wikimedia, etc. and am generally happy with what they do. That's not always a direct contribution to the particular software I use, but it does support some things indirectly.
In relation to Microsoft, I hear that they charge money and show ads, and I mostly hear their customers complaining about their software and services rather than praising them. For example, the centralisation of Skype for spying purposes seems to have crippled its throughput; I saw someone struggling with this recently and suggested they try meet.jit.si which turned out to give a far smoother connection (since it's P2P, like Skype used to be).
MS was, and possibly still is, the classical abuser of market position. The kind that age old antitrust laws were written to combat.