Windows 10 and your privacy.
Articles like this one and this one would make you think that Windows 10 is just harvesting and disseminating your personal information all willy-nilly, and virtually every such article references the exact same snippet:
So how bad is it?
Well, lets start with the simple. Microsoft is indeed collecting a ton more information than it did in previous versions of Windows. In large part, that is by necessity. And while many privacy groups advocate for an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out strategy the places where MS is doing this is actually very common and makes more sense to be defaulted on. Largely, this is around things like predictive text and Cortana. Predicting words is wholly dependent on real world data and Cortana like Google Now is largely dependent on accessing your information to be useful. A service like Cortana wouldn't be able to give you local news and weather without your location. It wouldn't be able to remind you of events or link them to people without access to contacts or calendar and it wouldn't be able to be proactive without access to things like email. Furthermore, the quality of the service would never improve without machine learning. This is why that data is being sent.
That still sounds a bit vague. And combined with the above quote, still a bit scary. Unfortunately, the quote is taken completely out of context and is in fact mis-represented in a VERY important way which would make this fact a lot more obvious. The above quote is taken from the first link and the important mis-representation in the quote is the "." at the end. You can find the full quote here is you go to the "Reasons We Share Personal Data" section and click "Learn More". What is actually there is a ":" and not a "." which is immediately followed by a listing of circumstances under which your personal data might be used/shared and those reasons are: They are compelled by law to share the information, to protect you from fraud, to protect their services and to protect their IP. Basically, nothing in there implying that they can actually just give your information away on a whim.
In other words, it really as implied if you don't expand out the "Learn More" section. They are using the data to enable and improve functionality. And, Microsoft hopes Cortana will be a differentiating feature on its platform. So, disabling things that it requires would be counter productive. There are other ways to do these things, for sure, and yes, you potentially sacrifice some anonymity to get these things. But it isn't the grand privacy breach that people are painting it as.
So, how do we end up with such misleading articles? Whether they insert a fraudulent period into their quotes or simply ignore the rest of the quote which happens to be the most important part, sites are basically just deceiving people. This is slime-ball journalism. It is positively scum.
To be fair, many sites don't even bother fact checking, and most, if not all of this probably originated from a single source. But, to be fair again, simply copying another story or referencing another story without verifying the facts is as bad as, if not worse than, intentionally misleading people.
The take away... the internet is awash with bad journalism and even more awash with users who don't care either. You need look no further than the comment sections on such articles to see this. Articles like this which paint the privacy terms as something that give Microsoft the rights to sell your information to the highest bidder or disseminate it freely at all are just attempting to create FUD.
will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary.
So how bad is it?
Well, lets start with the simple. Microsoft is indeed collecting a ton more information than it did in previous versions of Windows. In large part, that is by necessity. And while many privacy groups advocate for an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out strategy the places where MS is doing this is actually very common and makes more sense to be defaulted on. Largely, this is around things like predictive text and Cortana. Predicting words is wholly dependent on real world data and Cortana like Google Now is largely dependent on accessing your information to be useful. A service like Cortana wouldn't be able to give you local news and weather without your location. It wouldn't be able to remind you of events or link them to people without access to contacts or calendar and it wouldn't be able to be proactive without access to things like email. Furthermore, the quality of the service would never improve without machine learning. This is why that data is being sent.
That still sounds a bit vague. And combined with the above quote, still a bit scary. Unfortunately, the quote is taken completely out of context and is in fact mis-represented in a VERY important way which would make this fact a lot more obvious. The above quote is taken from the first link and the important mis-representation in the quote is the "." at the end. You can find the full quote here is you go to the "Reasons We Share Personal Data" section and click "Learn More". What is actually there is a ":" and not a "." which is immediately followed by a listing of circumstances under which your personal data might be used/shared and those reasons are: They are compelled by law to share the information, to protect you from fraud, to protect their services and to protect their IP. Basically, nothing in there implying that they can actually just give your information away on a whim.
In other words, it really as implied if you don't expand out the "Learn More" section. They are using the data to enable and improve functionality. And, Microsoft hopes Cortana will be a differentiating feature on its platform. So, disabling things that it requires would be counter productive. There are other ways to do these things, for sure, and yes, you potentially sacrifice some anonymity to get these things. But it isn't the grand privacy breach that people are painting it as.
So, how do we end up with such misleading articles? Whether they insert a fraudulent period into their quotes or simply ignore the rest of the quote which happens to be the most important part, sites are basically just deceiving people. This is slime-ball journalism. It is positively scum.
To be fair, many sites don't even bother fact checking, and most, if not all of this probably originated from a single source. But, to be fair again, simply copying another story or referencing another story without verifying the facts is as bad as, if not worse than, intentionally misleading people.
The take away... the internet is awash with bad journalism and even more awash with users who don't care either. You need look no further than the comment sections on such articles to see this. Articles like this which paint the privacy terms as something that give Microsoft the rights to sell your information to the highest bidder or disseminate it freely at all are just attempting to create FUD.
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