
Microsoft accused of adding spy features to Windows 7, 8 - chris-at
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/microsoft-accused-of-adding-spy-features-to-windows-7-8/
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Someone1234
This article's title is actually refuted by the article itself:

> Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on
> participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it
> appears that little or no traffic gets sent.

So unless you opt in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program,
none of this is meaningful. Windows 7 or 8 is not "spying" on you any more
than Windows 10 is.

Windows 10 has been accused of a lot, but every time you dig into the
accusations you come up with nothing. Nobody has been able to pin one actual
issue on Windows 10 yet, but not for lack of trying.

This all started because Microsoft had extremely aggressive metrics built into
the beta of 10, and then made the mistake of actually giving people all of
their privacy settings in one singular place (instead of distributing them all
over the OS like in 8 and prior).

If you ignore Cortana and associated privacy settings, very little has changed
in 10.

~~~
dynomight
>If you ignore Cortana and associated privacy settings, very little has
changed in 10.

Apparently there's some extra 'user experience' data gathering which must also
be adjusted in the privacy settings as you say. These will also be installed
on win7 and 8. I have my updates set on critical only and they haven't been
installed and I don't expect they will be.

I've had to change update settings after downloading from the microsoft site.
They changed them to 'treat suggested updates as critical' and then it
downloaded all the win10 update stuff. I ended up reinstalling cause I because
it installed about 60 or 70 things and my machine was acting strangely. I'll
have to keep a close watch on the settings.

I think the fear for me is not so much that Microsoft has access to my machine
and data. It's that this access is written in and can be exploited and
Microsoft has sat on its thumbs regarding security issues before. Also it
makes you have to trust how they treat your data whether they encrypt or make
it anonymous etc.

For these reasons and that Microsoft may be shifting toward a 'paid service or
ads punishment' type of service, I'm currently looking at PCBSD.

