Windows 10 spies on your use of System Settings (2021)

I disagree. I don’t want that feature. None of the photo apps I use by choice have it, and I’ve never once used it on iOS. It creates multiple albums for the same person anyway so it’s useless.

To just wildly speculate about mass surveillance without evidence is just baseless conspiracy theories, you really have nothing to worry about. Hope that helps.

Well apart from monitoring network traffic, with Ubuntu you can examine the source code for anything that you don't trust or dive into what system calls an application makes by using "strace".

Maybe you know this, but steam does more than get games playing on Linux. They (Valve?) have a group that develops drivers for AMD gpus on Linux. Their contributions still may not ve limited to just that primarily, but if there wasn’t Valve it would seem we’d have a lot less to play on Linux at the very least.

I was super pissed when epic announced dropping Linux support for Rocket League. Once it was done, I fell in love with Proton, it ran better than both the native Linux version, and the Windows version on Windows.

But it does not offer me a clickable "Play" button for exclusively Windows games, unfortunately. Or is this something else? Or perhaps I have to do some configuration of some sort? I am really not sure. It works for games that have Windows + Proton (icon / logo), but the games I want have only windows.

out of touch from reality

people that use windows want simplicity (kids, old people, office worker that want get the job done etc)

Yeah the new settings is not advance but that's the point

I'm not sure that's directly on control panel so much as which windows version you pick to look at, over the years it's changed as they try to make it friendly to different audiences. In win2k it's not very deep to get at, by default there's network places on the desktop you can right click to skip a few steps. Similarly they could improve the win8+ settings app but presumably they think win11's version is the best they can offer.

> That does no indicate good UX/UI.

Good UX/UI is to constantly change things because users are idiots anyway. /s

The problem is that this doesn't let you configure X detail about the NIC, most users don't need to ever configure that so they don't have that option in their updated control panel. The problem is that sometimes people do need to configure X, Microsoft can't just say to people you can no longer configure X, if it's a necessity for some use-cases. Their solution is to just leave the old legacy control panel software laying around forever for those situations. And that's bad UX/UI and bad for security, to leave this ancient unmaintained code on everyone's system.

Just because of incompetent modern design department "simplifying" everything to a point of unusability. Is windows supposed to be used for serious applications or is it just a consumer product for tech-illiterates? Microsoft doesn't seem to know. Why can I even buy a "enterprise" or "professional" version, this is clearly not intended to be used by me.

literally most user only need settings to restart wifi/internet, windows update and uninstall app

the rest are one time settings only (or just using default settings from manufacturer)

Just use the search box in the settings app?

Yes if it can be deanonymized then it’s not anonymous. Almost a tautology that.

You can’t send the telemetry over http without revealing an ip, but obviously that ip can’t be stored as part of the telemetry data. That’s PII and not anonymous at all.

Important: if I collect anonymous telemetry you better trust me that it’s anonymous when I say it is. Because if you don’t trust me on that then you can’t run the software at all (if it’s a piece of software that relies on web requests in some form at least). Otherwise why would you even trust that my opt in is respected? You have to trust software vendors of software that makes http requests. It’s as simple as that. You can use open source or try to inspect packets. Or firewall the software. But if it does (for example) one update check on startup which is common, then it’s almost impossible to tell whether it contains telemetry data. Because even the bare minimum request “this is FooApp 2.9.1 are there any updates” contains important usage stats: it’s +1 for the use counter and +1 for the v2.9 use counter!

I don't understand how you got that. The question was about network calls that an OS would perform on its own.

> (paid) user studies

Would it count as a paid user study if enabling telemetry for Windows knocked $10 off of the price of your computer?

I can’t decide if that’s a neat idea or dystopic. Which, historically, probably means it’s dystopic and that plenty of people are already doing it.

I think “traditional” paid user studies often suffer from the same sampling problems that make political polls and behavioral paid medical studies less useful (you’re not surveying the average voter; you’re surveying the average voter who likes to answer polls). But maybe the “$10 off” idea would capture a broad enough demographic as to be more useful.

> for system settings specifically, I wonder what kind of ad targeting would you get out of that?

You get sensitive data out of system settings, such as for instance health data: Does the user have a vision or hearing impairment, use assistive technologies etc.?

No, sorry. Testing answers “does the feature work?”. Usage telemetry answers questions like “was the feature a good idea?” and “are enough users successfully using the feature to justify the cost of creating/maintaining it?”.

Those are not questions for which pre-release testing can provide answers.

I’m not weighing in on opt-in vs opt-out, or on anonymization. Just saying that testing doesn’t cover this niche.

(Separately, I think you’re largely wrong about testing as well: crash dump collection is about finding issues that pre-release testing wouldn’t find at any price. For things like OSes especially, the permutation space of hardware * software * user behavior is too large. While I’m sure a few companies use crash reporting as a crutch to support anemic QA programs, I do not think that many do.)

Testing?

You can’t say how your users use your software through testing. Not by surveys/panels/interviews either.

But yes: alternatives are also morr expensive (which means it’s expensive for the end user). Users pay one way or another.

In that case sure maybe not. However, most systems aren't run by deep experts but by regular users which expect a device to be plugged into a network and then have the capability to use the internet without user interference. That more or less necessitates DHCP.

If the user develops something they can do it however they want. It’s not “theirs” because it’s installed on their machine. They can’t even control how it runs on their machine short of sandboxing it. They can choose to run it as the developer wanted or not at all.

You didn’t answer the question: should it be somehow banned?

For the sake of argument, the only interesting discussion about telemetry is about whether it’s ok when done right.

I don’t think anyone thinks it’s ok when it’s not done right (not anonymous, dark patterns for opt in/out, etc).

So it’s not a very interesting discussion to have since there is no one arguing for it.

Instead my argument is: when done right, anonymous telemetry isn’t “evil”. To be fair I don’t know if many argue it is either. There are a few absolutists that think not even opt-in telemetry is acceptable and that developers should do more expensive studies to find how their software is used. It’s really only those I disagree with.

Overton window calculation usually starts at a minimum of two inputs without proximity requirements (except technical requirements like linguistics/ functional semantics)*

[ * Only because an opinion may appear too far removed from a given perceived spectrum-threshold for 'reasonable reasoning'.. should not necessitate collapsing the contrasting input to some purely sarcastic/humorous telos, especially when this stochastically undermines one's own chances for being afforded the inversely congruent gesture]

Trust to do what?

"Trust" is something that has scopes, and extents, and subjects and objects. It is nonsensical to ask such a question as "Guess how much people trust Microsoft". Because you have not defined any scope or categories or extent of that trust.

I trust a toddler not to run out into the street and I trust a toddler not to stick their head inside an oven. I do not trust a toddler to prepare fugu sushi, nor do I trust the toddler to weld steel girders at a height of 1000 meters.

I would trust my hypothetical wife to maintain our conversations and personal history as confidential. This is a mutual and reciprocal trust. I would trust her to prepare that fugu sushi for me, and while I would trust her skills in welding and safety precautions, I would do everything husbandly possible to ensure that she doesn't need to take a job as a welder.

I trust Microsoft to provide software to me, and I trust them to exceed their "no warranty for any purpose" sort of service disclaimers. I trust Microsoft to respond in a timely fashion to CVEs and release software updates. I trust Microsoft implicitly, because the vast majority of businesses trust Microsoft, and those cumulative business decisions have influenced my sentiment about trusting Microsoft to provide software, hardware, and services to me, over the course of 35+ years. Likewise, my somewhat paranoid and crumudgeonly father trusts Microsoft with a similar scope, although he did not trust their Aero UI interface and stubbornly simulated a Windows 95 desktop on XP...

I do not trust Microsoft to bear my children or prepare meals for me. I do not trust Microsoft to cultivate a potato farm or raise chickens. Despite these emails I've been getting which offer me $3 off every Microsoft-raised chicken, guaranteed hormone-free.

So you see that "trust" has many ways to qualify it, and some blank slate of unspecified "trust" is meaningless, as meaningless as your "Best Song of All Time" means nothing to me, because I don't know your criteria or scope.

Do you trust a toddler these days?