Following the publication last year of the data collected by Windows 10’s built-in telemetry and diagnostic tracking, Microsoft today announced that the next major Windows 10 update, due around March or April, will support a new app, the Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer, that will allow Windows users to browse and inspect the data that the system has collected.
While I doubt this tool will alleviate any of the concerns some people have over Windows 10’s data collection, it does at least give some insight into what’s being sent to Microsoft – assuming, that is, you trust the reporting to be truthful and accurate.
You josh, would any reader of OSAlert be foolish enough to trust such reporting. I think not , even if it was true…
Precisely.
Because everyone is “smarter” than that, in spite of the fact Microsoft would be complete and utter morons to release a tool that was later proven to lie about what data they collect, even though it would open them up to massive class action lawsuits.
Microsoft has a huge incentive to be absolutely transparent here, and practically no reason whatsoever to lie or obfuscate.
That doesn’t matter any longer though, because society has no interest in “true” or “false”.
Our “news providers” are “entertainment companies”, and have no obligation to report the truth, the American President lies, and calls out any attempts to correct him as “fake news”.
And the internet is full of self-opinionated blowhards who have no idea what the truth is, but they’ll repeat whatever they heard, because it makes them look cool.
Microsoft could open up their entire codebase to the public, and people would STILL believe they were hiding something.
Apple, meanwhile, releases incredibly insecure software, hides billions in tax revenue, slows down their older phones deliberately, and created the original walled garden (iTunes) and replaced it with an even more locked-in walled garden (App Store!) and people still think they’re the greatest computer company that ever existed.
As a society, I don’t think we’re capable of recognizing “truth” any longer. Our signal to noise ratio has hit zero.
Yeah, some of the shit Apple has pulled recently (and not so recently) has even opened up the eyes of some of their biggest fans. Yet there are still those die hards that would still buy their products because they are convinced they are still the best option, mostly without ever trying another option.
Only technologically (or politically) naive people give a blank cheque of permissions.
I recommend you to read “Reflections on Trusting Trust” by Thompson and search for Debian’s reproducible builds project.
Microsoft never lied to us before. They have no reason to do so. That’s why they are always open, never hide anything. Their sources are open to public and they don’t contain any stolen code. They never attack any other company on false basis, they never buy a company just to shut down its business. This is, my friend, best thing that happened to humanity since invention of a wheel. That’s why we should trust them when they say we should trust them. POTUS is a completely different thing. His office is aimed at making money in any way possible, no matter the cost, by principle.
Your sarcasm is failing. I never said, or implied any of that.
I said it doesn’t matter whether Microsoft is telling the truth, because no one cares about the actual truth any longer– merely the perceived truth.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to claim someone was lying, you needed actual proof. Now, even if you have proof, no one will believe you.
Hard to believe we went from the “information age” to the “post truth” age… but never underestimate society’s ability to screw itself.
Which implies you don’t expect MS to lie because they cannot afford to, which frankly is a laughable argument.
What can I say? The sarcasm tags are missing. But, no, Microsoft can’t afford to be perceived as lying here– the mere fact that they released the tool says Microsoft believes they have to be more transparent.
We Can Always Keep On without truth.
But every time it happens, We are at War.
I’m quite upset at the policies of the industry. But wouldn’t like to start a digital War.
We NEED, to fix this, to make the Military Internet, finally Civilian.
Our colective futures depend on it.
Microsoft is being both transparent and obfuscating at the same time with this tool. They can point at it and say “Oh, we’re telling you what’s going to our servers!” and that is one face of the truth. But they’re withholding what the meaning of data being sent is. If you’re looking at 0x4523FACB without context, it’s just a hex number without meaning other than its arithmatic value. It’s meaningless without the interpretive information. That’s what’s going on here.
The reason we can’t “recognize the truth” any more is because no one is TELLING the full truth. Even Microsoft isn’t telling the full truth here.
Are you basing this on an objective evaluation of their new tool?
Or are you merely speculating?
i notice big difference between 2 OS’es that on any WIndows PC, i tested your theory, i download a torrent movie to prove my point on both worlds…on windows, somehow i notice heavy HDD activity and net than any UNIX-like os….on apple and linux side…no hdd activity since i am root user that only user have access while apple its disabled but that can be tweak to turn on, its security protocols to protect the users make changes to the os drivers and libs….nothing more but apple is inch closer to removed it due to large hackintosh community keep on messing with their proprietary stuff for AMD cpu’s…they don’t want AMD boxes that ruined their business with Intel partnership…but my point is i got letter from my ISP of warning me not download anymore movies on torrent..so windows send data to isp while apple ….zero data been sent and neither any Unix-like due to its kernel is foreign on the net…
Are you that clueless or just a bad troll? Reasons for HDD thrashing while torrenting could be numerous… like for example that it’s an old, fragmentned OS install and a popular torrent, with lots of peers / transfers of different fragments of the file, scattered across the disk.
And your ISP sees all your traffic, that’s all they need to have to know you’re torrenting.
And I suppose you don’t realize that most seeder boxes are run on Linux… (not to mention servers in general)
Trust is not easy to acquire, but it’s very easy to lose. And once lost, it doesn’t matter how many cynical or sarcastic followers you line up, how many apps you make, tools you release, it still will take you more time than you can afford to get it back. Its just how it is. Speaches like “society has no interest in” have no place in such a context, since this is not a religious or social issue. Never was, never will be.
Microsoft still got plenty trust after they pulled of their bait & switch scam to trick people into upgrading to Windows 10. In fact Microsoft has done a lot of nasty things and never lost trust. Observations indicate that trust is actually pretty hard to lose for Microsoft.
You’re sure it’s not a religious issue at least to some?
You are assuming here that you know MS has nothing to hide, which is a huge leap of faith considering that if they had something to hide then they would hide it thus making it hard to find out about it.
So the reality is that we really do not know if MS has an incentive to lie or not. This makes having blind faith in them by assuming we know their motives risky.
But most people really do not care about their privacy. MS has already admitted that they can view your files and virtually everything you do on Windows 10, so really when it comes to privacy MS already tells us their customers have none and many people like it that way.
It makes sense too, why would they let their cattle have privacy? Privacy only makes it harder to manage cattle especially if the cattle has the potential to develop intelligence.
why trying hurt a company used unix OS has no capabilities to spy or to know who is the user…its BSD
All data? you trust them? really? more like this is just we are going to own up to slurping…
by rights no government employee (of any government!) should be allowed to use this os…
Thanks to Microsoft People. Maybe -just maybe- smashing the issue into consumers cotidianity, could make the glacier finally start walking.
This is a huge change on the Corp politics, with efects on the bottom line.
Yes, the brand new Diagnostic Data Viewer really gives insight in what data exactly is sent to the Microsoft Mother-ship (Rolls Eyes). I made a screenshot for you. Good luck figuring out the Gibberish
http://s1057.photobucket.com/user/ml2mst2/media/DDV.jpg.html
If you want an OS that doesn’t track your every move and report back to mamma then run Linux or BSD UNIX. It is as simple as that.
Reporting must be truthful and accurate since GDPR ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation ) will take effect on 25 May 2018 in EU. After that date MS must comply with EU regulation.
Why would anyone trust the reporting to be truthful and accurate? I guess for many people blind faith in big corporations would be a good enough reason. But is there also some kind of evidence that people who are not complete idiots could rely on for this?
There’s a difference between having a healthy skepticism and having paranoid delusions.
Here we already have the “we can never trust closed source” argument, the “they will lie” argument and a lot more that are delusional. Crazy in other words.
You can already see what Microsoft sends if you want to, just make sure to log everything sent to their servers and go through it. You can do it, people skilled in reverse engineering can do it just as they do with everything else.
If someone could show that MS pushes any data but what they claim that person/group would gain fame and money (plenty of people wanting skilled security researchers).
The one that can show MS in some way exposes users when collecting some data (intentionally or accidentally) the same applies. Money and fame have still not produced anything like that.
And the same of course applies when they will directly expose the data sent from a certain computer – show just one thing omitted.
But talk is cheap.
Can you, now?
Don’t you think they would have thought about people snooping around their data traffic? Maybe they even hired a bright light that thought about implementing encryption before sending that data out in the open!
I’m guessing…
I bring up this issue all the time with people and clients and the attitude is so cavalier and they just dont care. As long as they can Youtube and surf the web they just dont care. Thats the main issue that we have. People wont care until something happens that it affects them personally.