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Comment by emurillo510 | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently a Microsoft employee, I feel like your data is secure, at least from my experiences. we are audited by consultants regularly and have internal teams making sure there are no security breaches. even things like log messages are scrubbed and strictly PR reviewed, but that's just my org. It could be different elsewhere

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I'm not a regular Windows user (mostly use it for games), so maybe this doesn't apply fully to me.

Although I'm not particularly confident in MS's security competence (judging by Windows' security track record), I don't think the main issue people take with this data collection is related to breaches by outside entities. At least in my case, it's not.

What I take issue with is the same as for Google et al.: I find it creepy and don't want MS (or Goog / Apple / etc) to keep tabs on me, on what I do, and to try to find a way to make me buy more random crap with their ads.

I'm also uncomfortable with the avenues this opens for State-level surveillance and the use of wonky "IA" to check on whether I'm doing anything "illegal" on my device. Cf the guy whose Google account got suspended for sending pictures of his son to a doctor.

I feel like your data is secure

I don't care if it's secure. It's my data, not yours. You have no business hoarding it in the first place.

If I take copy of your diary without your permission and pinky-swear that I won't share it with anyone else, does that make it right?

Why do tech companies have such a hard time just doing the right thing?

Why do you want to spy on me to begin with?

That's simple. After they fired all their beta testers and QA department, MS converted all non-business Windows OSes to be 'automatic-and-irrevocable-opt-in'.

Well, and it's also some of the richest user datasets. Google is doing it. Apple is doing it. Amazon is doing. So why not MS? It's not like we have hard privacy laws in this country!

It's pretty funny actually. Nobody really uses the data they slurp up, except as an excuse not to fix any bugs or improve anything

"Oh, only 1% of users are hitting this one!" (Reduce priority, ignore, automatically close for "zero bug bounce")

>Nobody really uses the data they slurp up, except as an excuse not to fix any bugs or improve anything

And they remove necessary features then lie, "Our telemetry suggests that people don't use those features."

I think you mean well, but this comes across as very naive. You could guarantee security by not collecting data without a very narrow, very well communicated, very opt-in perspective in the first place. It is obvious to me that the data is being collected to help Microsoft, third parties and perhaps some undefined future use - not of those are me.

It must really depend on the org, because Azure is a security shitshow that indicates multiple teams there haven't even dreamt about thinking about security. Multiple highly critical cross-tenant vulnerabilities in the span of two years, some of them trivial, is not a good look on Microsoft as a whole.

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