Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

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>"Microsoft collects and uses various types of data, such as your device location, data from your calendar, the apps you use, data from your emails and text messages, who you call, your contacts and how often you interact with them on your device. Cortana also learns about you by collecting data about how you use your device and other Microsoft services, such as your music, alarm settings, whether the lock screen is on, what you view and purchase, your browse and Bing search history, and more.”

>But this is not all, as this piece of software also analyses undefined “speech data”: “we collect your voice input, as well your name and nickname, your recent calendar events and the names of the people in your appointments, and information about your contacts including names and nicknames.

>But Microsoft’s updated privacy policy is not only bad news for privacy. Your free speech rights can also be violated on an ad hoc basis as the company warns:

>“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”, for example, “protect their customers” or “enforce the terms governing the use of the services”.

https://edri.org/microsofts-new-small-print-how-your-persona...

>How to turn off Windows 10's keylogger (yes, it still has one)

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2974057/windows/how-to-turn-...

"Microsoft does not collect any personal information via inking or typing.... The data is put through rigorous, multi-pass scrubs to ensure it does not collect sensitive or identifiable fields (e.g., no email addresses, passwords, alpha-numerical data, etc.). Data is also chopped into very small bits and stripped of sequence data so it cannot be put back together or identified. The data samplings collected are limited; Microsoft is not capturing everything you write, nor is it capturing data every time."

https://lifehacker.com/what-windows-10s-privacy-nightmare-se...

So the keylogger part (your claim "everything you type from a Windows computer is stored on their systems") isn't true. Anything to back up your webcam claim? Your rant about what Cortana collects is necessary for Cortana to do its job, just as storing emails is necessary for an email service to do its job.

> Microsoft does not collect any personal information via inking or typing....

That's claim that cannot be verified.

Until Microsoft provides a clear, unobfuscated method to verify what is being sent, and also option to 100% disable all phoning home, there will be a suspicion of their own making.

Anything other is just obfuscation and PR.

Why don't you set a breakpoint just before it encrypts what it's collected, peek in memory and find out for yourself?

That it the market Microsoft is aiming for? Will your grandma do it? Or she doesn't need the transparency and fair dealing?

Your grandma comment is misguided. Your parent comment has a good point.

If a system is sending out sensitive data, there is a way to figure it out by setting breakpoints and reverse engineering the payload that is getting encrypted.

Once a researcher finds whether or not sensitive data is being sent, the researcher can publish the information so that your grandma can know about it and she can have the transparency and fair dealing she needs.

Or, you know, demand from the vendor to supply a system that doesn't need a researcher, who was able to secure a funding for such an endeavor.

Meanwhile, the point still stands: windows phones home, sends out the data, which are encrypted in transport, obfuscated inside, and the user has zero control about it. Requiring the user to prove which data were send and which weren't is dishonest; it is the vendor who has the source code and knows exactly the answer for what is being asked of the user.

Problem is that Microsoft still enjoys a practical monopoly on workstations and desktops, so there's very little pressure for them to actual do what people are asking. Case in point: we still have forced updates and ads in the start menu.

If there were a worthwhile competitor, I know a lot of people who would switch in a heartbeat, but even then Microsoft probably wouldn't care. I am increasingly convinced that it is Microsoft's unstated goal to kill off desktop personal computing entirely so they can push people into a subscription-based cloud service for everything.

If the vendor supplied such a system or provided the answer to your question, would you trust it? Why?

You always need independent researchers to verify vendor's claims.

That's where the transparency comes in.

In most linux distribution, when you have a crash and the crash reporting is enabled, you can peek into what exactly is going to be sent. If you have smallest of the doubt, you can opt to not send anything. Or opt out of sending anything, ever.

Of course, seeing that the data you submit is used to solve your specific problem, and not disappearing into black hole just to feed some analytics, helps with the motivation to submit.

No need to debug the constantly changing code. Even if your researcher verifies, that a specific release sends only such and such data, the next months release can send something else. The verification would take longer than a month, and given the cadence of releases, would be permanently out of date.

If the vendor wrote crash reports which you could review before sending, would you trust that the crash report is actually what is being sent?

If you opted out of sending anything, do you really trust that the vendor is not sending anything?

You still need to research what is going on at the low level to be sure if something is being sent or not and what is being sent. Your grandma is going to rely on the information obtained from independent researchers.

Yes, the behavior of Linux distributions are also independently audited by independent researchers.

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