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Rant about Windows 10 Privacy and other stuff

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Here is my little rant about Windows 10. Just a disclaimer: I do have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft over the years.

Here goes. When I upgraded to windows 10 I was very happy at the beginning with the new UI that harkens back to Windows 7. It looked like a return to form, after the fumble that is Windows 8. What I didn’t know was the kind of stuff Windows 10 doesn’t like to tell you about.

- Auto Updates: They are great, but I would like to do them on my own terms. Even the paranoid Apple asks you if you like to apply the update now or later. In Windows 10, they removed this option. To make things worse, the service that they wrote to look for windows update performs horribly. I would just find my CPU consumption at 15-20%, and disk reads at about 30% when I have 0 windows open. This really irked me, so I did some research, and I found that the only way to manually do updates, is to trick Microsoft by telling it that your wifi connection is slow. That feature is actually meant for mobile devices, but since Windows 10 is shared across all devices it works on PC too.

Now for the Kicker
-  Telemetry: Did you guys know that microsoft keeps collecting data about your usage and sends it to their servers. They claim it is to improve Windows. Well I am paranoid and I don’t like that so I went to turn it off, and you guessed it, you can’t. You can only do it in the enterprise version of Windows 10 (because probably they think IT’s of corporations are smarter than the average Joe who uses Windows). You can lower the amount being sent to “Basic”, but that still sends them information. To make things worse, just like in the auto updates, the Telemetry service always seems to be taking 33% of my disk usage.

So to recall, you can’t turn off auto updates without a silly hack, you can’t tur off spying and both of them drastically lower the performance of your PC.

Does anyone else experience this?

     
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I work in ACNielsen and we have all the access to customer profiles and usage.
When we get the data from companies , esp tech ones it labels all the usage and stuff you are talking about. It comes with heavy price, research companies fight for these to
get customer outlook and suit their businesses or tailor to customer target base.
Not too different from no of hours you played Titanfall2 or EA sports
When i first got into marketing, i wasnt shocked by the surveillance, its part of the game. All tech companies are about one thing, Reading minds of customer. Consumer behavior is bottomline.
Infact in larger picture what i was taught in CSR and Sustainability, majority of Companies use it as marketing tool, to manage perception among public, not out of virtue.

Reason of my rant is to just tell you that you are being monitored in ways you cannot imagine and ironically have played games with narrative about it.

Data Analytics or BigData the new discipline offering 6 figure jobs.
It will be all about collecting data and profiling, and its gonna get much bigger and
surveillance is at the core of it.

     
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nomadsoul - 14 November 2016 12:51 PM

I work in ACNielsen and we have all the access to customer profiles and usage.
When we get the data from companies , esp tech ones it labels all the usage and stuff you are talking about. It comes with heavy price, research companies fight for these to
get customer outlook and suit their businesses or tailor to customer target base.
Not too different from no of hours you played Titanfall2 or EA sports
When i first got into marketing, i wasnt shocked by the surveillance, its part of the game. All tech companies are about one thing, Reading minds of customer. Consumer behavior is bottomline.
Infact in larger picture what i was taught in CSR and Sustainability, majority of Companies use it as marketing tool, to manage perception among public, not out of virtue.

Reason of my rant is to just tell you that you are being monitored in ways you cannot imagine and ironically have played games with narrative about it.

Data Analytics or BigData the new discipline offering 6 figure jobs.
It will be all about collecting data and profiling, and its gonna get much bigger and
surveillance is at the core of it.

I do realize that all websites gather data about your usage. This was big news:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-04/yahoo-admits-secretly-hacking-customer-accounts-us-intelligence

When I opt to use a website or service (like youtube, gmail, playing a video game), I know what I say or use is being recorded. I can just choose not to use them if I want to. I guess what I can’t come to terms with, is scanning the offline files on my PC by an operating system. Now there is nothing safe, all your offline files are potentially online whether you choose to post them or you don’t.

     
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nomadsoul - 14 November 2016 12:51 PM

Reason of my rant is to just tell you that you are being monitored in ways you cannot imagine and ironically have played games with narrative about it.

Again in broader scheme of things, we are monitored, scanned and regulated.
Privacy and choice will be blurred and perish into non existence
First they will make you dependent on software or system and you will see laws , then peers adopting it, and then you will see the utility and there you go, assimilation.

I was right, UK is first to hammer it openly in big way

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/investigatory-powers-bill-act-snoopers-charter-browsing-history-what-does-it-mean-a7436251.html

     
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nomadsoul - 14 November 2016 12:51 PM

I work in ACNielsen and we have all the access to customer profiles and usage.

Nomadsoul, how do you rhyme that with your posts in this thread?

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Karlok - 14 November 2016 07:42 PM
nomadsoul - 14 November 2016 12:51 PM

I work in ACNielsen and we have all the access to customer profiles and usage.


Nomadsoul, how do you rhyme that with your posts in this thread?

But if you are,

Yup gray moral area and part of my discipline, real world view.
And part of the consumerism or capitalism, if you go by the book.
We need to keep building patterns or correlation between datas to suit the need of clients ,so that they can use that for their product strategies.

We have data of Ads exposure or rich media , why a certain commercial is expensive on TWD TV and why certain ad has to pop up on PSN or XB1 UI and so on, each aspect is based on research, research gained by research companies and they work smoothly by exploiting loopholes in privacy clauses.

Moreover, my cousins work in Apple and Fbook too, she gives fbook profiles photos to any relative of hers when asked, in other words your fbook profile even though secured from strangers, is accessible by guy/girl in cubicle of Fbook office in SiliconValley, can be accessed and shared.

TL;Dr= Dont have false expectations from the field of marketing and IT, its gray world

     
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Of course I was serious. Yeah, gray area. Dark gray, almost black. IMO.

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Karlok - 15 November 2016 07:14 AM

Of course I was serious. Yeah, gray area. Dark gray, almost black. IMO.

     
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That’s profound wisdom on some level and superficial bullshit on another.  Tongue

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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So i edited my post(post#3) by mistake instead of quoting so there you go

http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/8876/#125125

There are new porn laws too in UK which you can google yourself

     
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I don’t believe everything is getting ‘worse’ honestly. First step is being aware of the problem and after the mass surveillance by US government a lot of people woke up.
What is going to happen now is that there is going to be competition by companies that are going to insure costumer privacy and then a lot of people are just going to use this alternative. There are already a couple of instances where companies took the FBI to court because they order them to share customer metadata and they refused.
There is already a secure AM service for the phone called ‘Signal’. The provider doesn’t collect customer data.
Also you can use ‘Tor’ for internet browsing. Much more secure than the more popular ones but still not 100%.

     
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Anyone caught in some stuff without any traceable data is prone to more questioning.
Hey where is your browsing history, Well hmmmm….well you are Suspicious!
On other hand some random Hentai site could cost you randomly
Heavy shit

     
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Some more Windows 10 hate. Who here loves Cortana, not the awesome Halo AI, but the annoying Windows version of Siri? Well I sure don’t like it when she reminds me that today is black Friday and it is a great day for shopping. So I thought like any reasonable person would, why not turn it off. It seems reasonable that it is a feature you can turn off right? I took part of Windows 10 before they released the anniversary edition, and in that version you can turn off through Windows settings.

Well after Windows 10 anniversary, you guessed it right, you cannot turn off Cortana in the normal way. From howtogeek:

“Microsoft doesn’t want you to disable Cortana. You used to be able to turn Cortana off in Windows 10, but Microsoft removed that easy toggle switch in the Anniversary Update. But you can still disable Cortana via a registry hack or group policy setting. This transforms the Cortana box into a “Search Windows” tool for local application and file searches.

Cortana has become increasingly restrictive since Windows 10’s release. It was previously updated to ignore your default web browser. Cortana now always launches the Microsoft Edge browser and only uses Bing when you search.”

Yeah so uses Bing only and doesn’t care if you have Chrome or Firefox or what have you, AND needs a registry hack to stop it.

Something less intrusive than Cortana but still annoying to the power user is the Windows Defender in Windows 10. You also can’t turn it off without some registry settings.

     
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Origami - 24 November 2016 08:14 PM

I don’t believe everything is getting ‘worse’ honestly. First step is being aware of the problem and after the mass surveillance by US government a lot of people woke up.
What is going to happen now is that there is going to be competition by companies that are going to insure costumer privacy and then a lot of people are just going to use this alternative. There are already a couple of instances where companies took the FBI to court because they order them to share customer metadata and they refused.
There is already a secure AM service for the phone called ‘Signal’. The provider doesn’t collect customer data.
Also you can use ‘Tor’ for internet browsing. Much more secure than the more popular ones but still not 100%.

The truth of the matter is, most of the money comes from ads not from people opting not to get them, and those ads are now targeted based on your usage. So more detailed information about you (what games you play, the food pictures you post on facebook, what language you use in your email etc, etc, etc…) is all extremely valuable information for marketing companies like nomad stated before.

That plague is already part of the internet, which is why I opt to use a VPN and not post anything on twitter/facebook/instagram. But when it becomes part of an OS, there is no way to bypass it without unplugging your computer from the internet. People can say, “Well SD, you don’t have to use Windows. You can use a Mac or even better, Linux.” To that I say “Bullshit.” I use a PC mainly for gaming, and Microsoft has a monopoly on gaming on the Windows platform. If I go for a Mac, more than half of my library won’t run, and let’s not mention the barely existent Linux support.

     
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I have Win10 on my iMac (I only use it to run games that I can’t run natively in MacOS or using wine) and I don’t even know how to use Cortana. Does it listen to you all the time? Because then I have to find a way to switch off the microphone.

     
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tsa - 13 December 2016 03:42 PM

I have Win10 on my iMac (I only use it to run games that I can’t run natively in MacOS or using wine) and I don’t even know how to use Cortana. Does it listen to you all the time? Because then I have to find a way to switch off the microphone.

It’s the search field on your taskbar that you can use to search for stuff, either online or on your computer. It also sends you notifications about random things and recommends things to you. If you are not comfortable with Cortana running on your PC, howtogeek has an article about how to disable it:
http://www.howtogeek.com/265027/how-to-disable-cortana-in-windows-10/

but it involves registry editing so be careful.

     

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