So basically... for a driver installation it even rings home? So they made it so ingrained (like IE in win95/98) that you can't really use windows without allowing it to ring home. Interesting that nobody sued MS already like they did with the IE/netscape lawsuit in the 90's (not that that helped in any way).
It rings home for every program install as well, the "smartscreen" they created for IE to make sure websites were safe has been redone to include drivers and programs.
By the way, MS didn't fear the I.E. lawsuit and they won't fear this if it does. By bundling IE with Windows in the EU, MS was making $10mil per day while the fine was $1mil per day. Which is why it took them 6 months to release a patch/version without, by which time they had put out enough F.U.D. to convince people they didn't want Windows without I.E. As a result, they sold almost no copies (which is what they told the court would happen), but stopped the fines and allowed them to keep selling the one that included I.E. and making the full $10mil per day.
The same will happen with this if forced. Ms will spend a few million spewing F.U.D. telling people how their system protects you from malicious programs, and would you rather destroy your computer or would you prefer this. Considering the current climate regarding terrorism, you can probably guess what would happen.
I really didn't knew that. That is scary stuff. So they basically backported telemetry.
Nothing basic about it, it's exactly what they did.
Yeah, I didn't really expect linux to go this route. I hope at least linux will remain a somewhat viable option.
Canonical learned a hard lesson from it and they have yet to recover from it competely, go look at Distrowatch and see where Ubuntu ranks.
They went from first, to third.
They get half the traffic as Debian, which gets 2/3rds the traffic of Mint.
What gets me is many pushed for Linux to be more Windows like, and many said absolutely not. Then Microsoft makes a huge blunder removing the start menu, leaving Linux more Windows-like than Windows, and what does Ubuntu and Gnome do? Instead of capitalizing on that they both enter the race for a tablet ui. There's a reason Cinnamon (built on top of Gnome 3) is climbing the charts at an amazing rate.
As for being viable, there has never been a time in history that Linux was more viable than right now. I see Open office on more and more computers these days, where it used to only ever be Office. Cinnamon and KDE have pretty much closed the gap in terms of the desktop environments, and Steam is making great strides on Linux gaming. Driver support direct from companies is getting better as well, in fact the only company really going backwards on Linux support, seems to be Intel.
I get what you are saying. But this doesn't justify anything MS is doing.
MS is in a fight for survival.
What they are doing with Win10 is similar to what they are doing with Office, and what other mobile companies have been doing all along, selling the data. MS has to bide their time until they can find a way to breach the mobile market, which so far has eluded them.
They gave away 5% of the desktop market selling their soul for a 3% share in the dying tablet market, and a dwindling 1% share in the phone market.
Why? Because the pc market is going to die in the next 10 years, everything will be running off your cell phone. Don't call them dead yet though, MS has a massive fund for acquiring companies and an almost equally large one stashed just for emergencies. They are not in the situation Blackberry was. MS can stick around a long time on what money they have and resort to familiar tactics, quietly buying up tech companies already with a foot in the door. Buying Nokia proved fruitless, but what if they bough LG or Samsung's phone division... Sounds insane? There was rumors about LG recently.
At least I have to ACTIVELY go on facebook and other sites (google) to get companies to spy on me. With MS, the only thing I have to do is boot up windows. Now I come to think of it, the fact that MS builds this spying into the OS, data harvesting companies like google and amazon and the lot apparently didn't find it enough to follow people's browser behavior and they now want OS behavior as well. So there must be a market for OS spying. Assuming, of course, that it isn't for the sole purpose of the us government and that the US is basically paying / summoning MS to build in backdoors and spying.
It's not that there's a market for spying at the desktop level, most of that is for MS to use for looking at trends on how you are using it, but that data can be misinterpreted, which was what led to the start menu being killed. MS can't directly monetize that data, but they can use it to focus their efforts, or push ads on you. Which is what they are doing with it.
What they can do at the OS? You said it yourself, when you go to Facebook, they get what you send them, same as Google and Twitter, but if you control the device it's coming from, you get ALL of the data going to each of them.
It sounds like there is no way back, no real solution. I have thought about building a linux firewall, which serves as a proxy. Literally log every connection coming in and coming out, try to find human readable names for the ips. Do deep packet inspection and find out wtf is going on these days. But that would be really a lot of work.
Even running everything through a proxy or firewall will not fix it, yes, you stop MS, but you still crippled the OS if you don't let the data through.
There is a way back, to an extent.
There are bills coming down to limit spying on you at the ISP/router level, but that will not stop device and OS manufacturers from spying.
From there it gets more difficult.
There is unconfirmed reports that Lenovos now have spyware built into them at the hardware level, so you may want to avoid them, but there are other alternatives. We are now starting to see entire laptops and other systems made entirely of open source parts, often QUITE expensive I think that's being paranoid and/or unrealistic since you never truly know 100%.
You can however buy from reputable sources (preferably made in a country not know for such shenanigans) and use Linux. Some older Sony laptops were made in Japan with Japanese chips. For phones, look into custom roms built using Cyanogenmod (NOT Cyanogen, similar tech, different purposes), AOKP, or others, these will have as much spying removed as possible. But to remain that way, you really need to leave out the Google Apps and API system. Most mapping systems rely on the Google API, as do a lot of browsers and other functions, but you can have a fully working smart phone without it.
However, the second biggest leak of your data is still going to be social media.
Something else to think about all of this, too, at some point you become a target simply for not showing up anywhere. There are sites you can go to tell you how unique your browser data is, in many case, the more you try to hide, more unique you become, eve if they do not know who you are, they can track you just as easily. It's like wearing a trench coat to hide your identity, it works fine in winter, but in summer, you stick out like a sore thumb.
Here is one of those sites:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
