Microsoft has Finally Started Nagging Me

I've never seen a significant number of privacy related updates, and their privacy policy in previous windows versions was fairly standard.

It's only in windows 10 that they changed their privacy policy to basically give them free access to your computer and everything on it for any reason at all, not to mention uploading everything you type to microsoft servers, sharing your wifi key with your friend's friends, making it very difficult to use offline accounts without any of their cloud services crap attached, and even blatantly ignoring your privacy settings. (you can allegedly turn off most of the telemetry uploading; however Windows ignores the settings)

 

No, their first OS was MS-DOS (i.e a stolen copy of CP/M renamed to MS-DOS). First windows OS would have been 95 technically. (windows 1 was a file manager, 3.xx were basically a GUI on top of MS-DOS. IIRC you needed to buy a copy of MS-DOS and a copy of Windows 3.x separately.)

 

I have a strong suspicion that the EU are going to take issue with windows 10. european privacy laws are VERY stringent, and windows 10 violates pretty much all of them.

 

As if they would care. With them dominating 3/4 of the global market share (base on 2014 data shown in the spoiler below), they're over the wind. At best EU could sanction them to limit the data they gathered to certain purposes and prevent it from circulating on the world wide web. Data gathering is a billion dollar mining field.

Spoiler

 

collecting vast amounts of data for no clear purpose, ignoring the user's expressed wish for them not to collect said data, making it extremely difficult to prevent collection and transmission of said data for a start.

 

Data collected by search engines is provided by the user to the remote site. There is an implicit understanding that the search engines may keep records of search terms for indexing/statistics purposes.

Windows 10 privacy policy allows Microsoft to trawl through your computer looking for anything of interest for no specific reason, which is not permitted under EU law.

EU privacy law states that companies must be explicit about what data they collect, why they collect it, what they do with it, how it is stored, who has access to it and how long it is stored for. They must also provide a means for the user to request copies of all data relating to them, and to request destruction of said data. Plus they must give the user an option to opt out of the data collection, and respect that choice once it has been communicated to them. EU based websites, by law, even have to ask your explicit permission to use cookies.

Windows 10 provides a lot of reasonably well hidden controls that allegedly turns off the transmission of data to Microsoft, however a study by Ars Technica revealed that Windows 10 actually ignores the settings, so even if they're all turned off the data still gets transmitted; in clear violation of the opt-out provision of EU law.

The IP addresses of the servers to which the data is transmitted are hardcoded into the OS, making common tactics such as hosts modification or DNS blackholing ineffective at stopping the transmission of data.

As for not putting sensitive data on computers, so we cant use online banking anymore; and business should stop using computers entirely? Not in the slightest bit realistic.

 

I know a lot of FOREIGN banks have been hacked, UK banks generally have pretty good security and mine uses two factor authorisation, so unless they either have inside access or my bank card AND customer number, they'd have a hard time getting in to my account. Not saying it's not possible, just that it's too much effort to be justifiable for most hackers.

I don't have card details on PSN or google, so although I was affected by the PSN downtime (not really, I never play online), the hackers got nothing of value because there's nothing of value on my PSN account. Same for my google account.

Most online fraud is social engineering; i.e tricking the victim into giving out the money/information themselves. I am absolutely meticulous about what I give out, and I have no presence on any social media platforms.

My accounts are about as safe as is reasonably possible.

 

And today microsoft backported all the windows 10 spyware to windows 7, 8 and 8.1...

time to stop updating at all.

im beginning to wonder if the american intelligence service is involved in this...

 

KB3068708 ("Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry" and mandatory) KB3075249 ("Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7") and KB3080149 (also an "Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry", both optional) so far, but they're going to keep re-releasing them under different kb ids to make sure people don't manage to continually evade them.

 

no there aren't any timestamps, there never are.

I studied IT security, I know that social engineering is one of the most common means of getting information, simply because it's the easiest, and it generally works. Thats exactly why online safety lessons tell you to watch what information you give out online