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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Telemetry isn't just a tool for product managers, but it's also a goldmine for national security agencies (more than just the NSA; Bing is unblocked in China for a reason).

Anti-government meme made with GIMP at a specific timestamp? One search through the telemetry logs to find who exported a file at that exact moment.

Any data collection is also government surveillance unless proven otherwise.

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Microsoft provides a tool that allows you to see all telemetry that’s captured

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/01/24/micro...

I don’t work for microsoft anymore but I laugh at these sorts of suggestions. I don’t know much about bing but I do know a decent bit about the telemetry pipeline and the idea of an anti government meme detection is ludicrous at best.

> the idea of an anti government meme detection

That's a fun strawman you made, but the actual idea in the post was that telemetry might note when different programs do events like save.

With all due respect, the danger to a telemetry pipeline is almost always downstream effects, like court orders to intercept network data or human assets that knowingly exfiltrate data. Even if you assume that Microsoft has the best of intentions and that all of the telemetry is for the purposes of improving the software experience, it’s a naive assumption that this doesn’t increase the attack surface substantially. With no user accessible kill switch and with all teams operating with good intentions, you still stand to create scenarios like telemtry-for-surveillance, even if the probability of such a scenario is small in the grand scheme of things.

Imagine believing that Windows telemetry contains such data.

Imagine trusting Microsoft.

Imagine not knowing about The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity https://c2pa.org/

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