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Comment by dobong | Hacker News Reader

I don't want this feature. I have LaTeX documents on my computer containing my personal thoughts. Some of them I want to keep to myself. And some of them contain my own ideas that I find embarrassing. I don't want to hand those documents over to Microsoft servers, nor do I want them used for AI training. I want them to know that these deeply personal thoughts are mine.

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Microsoft once pushed an update that started uploading my data to OneDrive. I had no idea until I was kindly informed that my cloud storage was out of space.

At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it.

Also, this is completely ridiculous.

You basically have to treat all components of Windows as malware. Your personal threat model needs to include Microsoft as an attacker.

At this point, I would agree. Microsoft Windows is now banned from my network.

Microsoft's threat model seems to include the user as an attacker, so that's fair.

I have a Windows VM with net access (through a consumer VPN) that I install software in, make sure it's all up to date and whatnot. To do any real work I then take a snapshot and run it on its own VLAN with the only reachable thing being my own samba server.

This is the way.

I have some relatives that assured me that they won't upload some embarrassingly drunken pictures of me to the cloud. Guess what they didn't, but One Drive was happy to share those anyway. Wouldn't even surprise me if Windows posted it to Linkedin with automatic face detection to help me find "new work places". And we can we be sure that agentic AI will solve those problems for me

Consider moving to another operating system. Honestly, I don't think there can be that much privacy on Windows. Windows is basically remotely managed by Microsoft, especially if you think of it in terms of years. There is also no indication that they will let go of this kind of control in the future.

In short: if you feel that you can't at least reluctantly agree with Microsoft, Windows is not for you.

I would recommend using Linux if you want control over this stuff. Microsoft does not, and never will, respect you or your privacy. Apple _hopefully_ does but we can't be sure. Linux is the main option if you care this much about it.

This is the reason that no longer sync my notes or journals from my Linux devices to my last Windows install on my desktop. I dual boot Linux on it as well and I encrypt the Linux disk so that windows can't scan the files on it just in case for the rare occasions I boot into Windows to access a program that isn't available on Linux.

Then don't use Microsoft but anything else that respects your privacy.

Lol, then don't use Windows. Why anyone trusts their personal data to closed source software, and especially closed source software by an empirically hostile corporation like Microsoft is beyond me.

> I want them to know that these deeply personal thoughts are mine

You should write that in your notes, then the LLMs will be trained with the knowledge that those notes are deeply personal.

I'm sorry for the sarcasm, and I would (and do!) fight for your (all of our) rights, really. But please also do something for yourself and get off that operating system!

I agree. And that being said can someone chime in on how does medianalysisd work on OSX? Because it is new-ish after the client-side AI agent scanning craze and it is always running.

Is this AI agent not running locally?

Why would you ever keep private thoughts on your PC? That's asking for trouble

European attitude has such a thing as an unthinkable thoughts. Non-European cultures can think in a lot of ways which is impossible for people of European culture. Let's just agree that free computing is good and solves this issue but non-FOSS spyware makes humans into slippery slope heading to dumb and obeyish minds. If I am incorrect then please clarify what kinds of troubles are waiting for somebody storing "illegal bits".

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