Microsoft new Windows 10 privacy policy

[Purple]

Or had it be free for non commercial use.

[Ace Pace]

Microsoft would very much like to get everyone on Windows 10, because the faster it happens, the quicker everyone is on the same codebase, and they have to worry less about vulnerabilities in older versions of windows. That's the point of the free upgrade. All the fancy features that are new in the privacy policy can be turned off: Cortana and Bing integration with search, WiFi Sense, OneDrive (though that's actually from Windows , etc.

If all Microsoft wanted was the convenience of everyone being on one OS, they should have made a "strictly better" OS to attract us, instead of something bloated with borderline malware and sinister EULAs.

What the hell is a better OS?

[TimothyC]

No, we did not. We most emphatically did not.

I manage a household of four Windows 7 Pro machines, and NONE of them exhibited this behavior. I'd either start looking for malware, or questioning your birds.

[Batman]

Or maybe different versions of Win 7 behave differently. So far all the people saying 'um yes no Win 7 doesn't do that' are on 'Win 7 Professional'.
It might be interesting to know which iteration of Win 7 Broomstick ran into.

[Jub]

My copy of Windows 7 Premium barely seems to know that 10 exists. I have the icon on my taskbar, but I've never seen a popup or anything.

[Darth Quorthon]

Dumb question time, my PC running Windows 10 is connected to my router by an Ethernet cable, do I need to worry about it giving my Wi-Fi password away? When I go into Settings > Network & Internet, I don't even see a Wi-Fi option. Not that I'm overly worried, mind you, you pretty much have to be standing at the front door to my apartment to get a signal.

[Executor32]

No, that's only if you've connected to it over WiFi by entering the password, and even then you still have to give Windows permission to share it before it'll do so. If you decline when it asks for permission, then it won't.

[Executor32]

Ghetto edit:

No, we did not. We most emphatically did not.

I manage a household of four Windows 7 Pro machines, and NONE of them exhibited this behavior. I'd either start looking for malware, or questioning your birds.

Could've been one of those roving bands of IT professionals, sneaking into peoples' houses and reserving Windows 10.

Or maybe different versions of Win 7 behave differently. So far all the people saying 'um yes no Win 7 doesn't do that' are on 'Win 7 Professional'.
It might be interesting to know which iteration of Win 7 Broomstick ran into.

My brother's is Home Premium, actually, as is the front desk computer at work. Neither have had anything more than the tray icon show up, nor have they automatically downloaded anything related to the upgrade other than the reservation app itself, which as I mentioned earlier is only ~3.5 MB.

Windows 8/8.1 is a little more proactive about it, though, as the upgrade offer is now integrated into the OOBE, and if you manually tell Windows Update to check for updates, it defaults to upgrading you to 10 unless you click the 'Show other updates' link below the upgrade offer. Even so, it still won't proceed with the upgrade without first having you confirm it again.

[Wild Zontargs]

[Apologies for the semi-necro]

Whether what happened to Broomstick was user error or not, it looks like MS really is pushing out Win10 without asking now:

Microsoft, having learned nothing from Apple and the U2 album, have started downloading Windows 10 as part of Patch Tuesday for Windows 7 and 8 users. For people on a 32GB flash drive tablet, that's a big chunk of space taken up with something that they didn't ask for. Microsoft admits to doing this, but users are not happy. Way to look needy, Microsoft.

People are already pointing out that this is killing their low-cap data plans, and they're getting stuck with large overage fees.

[Zaune]

Either this is a truly epic feat of sabotage by embedded agents for the Linux Foundation or nobody working at Microsoft in a managerial capacity has ever had to worry about money.

[InsaneTD]

Both? I vote both.

[SpottedKitty]

or nobody working at Microsoft in a managerial capacity

... couldn't get a clue during clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if they smeared their bodies with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.

[Edi]

Question is, are they only pushing the upgrade in some countries or everywhere at once, and are they making any distinctions between operating system versions? I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate rather than the ubiquitous Home Premium and I could not only remove the Windows 10 downloader update with no problems, I'm not getting anything downloaded by force as of yet. I've seen people with the Home Premium version having a really hard time getting rid of the update thingy as well.

So they want the mass of regular users to change, but are they laying off the Professional and Ultimate installations for now, due to those being more commonly used in business environments or by power users?

[Wild Zontargs]

Could be. The download also requires that certain other updates that advertised Win10 at you are already installed, so if you avoided enough of those, it might not have the right dependencies to auto-download.

[SpottedKitty]

So they want the mass of regular users to change, but are they laying off the Professional and Ultimate installations for now, due to those being more commonly used in business environments or by power users?

<nod> Sounds like M$ wants us to be the scratch monkey again, doing the beta alpha testing for their Real Cu$tomer$...

[Xisiqomelir]

Broomstick is laying it straight, you will get the Doze whether you want it or not.

Microsoft is downloading Windows 10 to your machine 'just in case'

MICROSOFT HAS CONFIRMED that Windows 10 is being downloaded to computers whether or not users have opted in.

An INQUIRER reader pointed out to us that, despite not having 'reserved' a copy of Windows 10, he had found that the ~BT folder, which has been the home of images of the new operating system since before rollout began, had appeared on his system. He had no plans to upgrade and had not put in a reservation request.

....

More at link.

[Wild Zontargs]

Hey, remember those updates you intentionally didn't install, because they'd add telemetry and the update-to-10 nagware? They're back in your update queue again.

[Broomstick]

I don't know how the spouse did it, but he killed our update. So far it hasn't come back.

[Edi]

Basically you need to uninstall update kb3035585, immediately reboot the computer and then hide the update after that. It may still pop up later, because Microsoft has been doing that shit repeatedly before. I spent an hour yesterday getting my parents' computer unfucked because not only did I have to remove that update twice, I also had to disable it from three different places, put even more restrictions on other user profiles and set the updates to not install automatically.

And I just spent the better part of an hour getting rid of all the various telemetry (i.e. spyware) updates on my own machine and getting that sorted out. It is my expectation that sooner or later they will simply force update any computer with Windows 7 or 8 to Win10 if automatic update installs are enabled. After all, they classify the Win10 upgrade as an important update, so they can trigger it if they wish.

[Zaune]

I think this is as good a time as any to post a link to a really good lay-person's guide to switching from Windows to Linux. It was primarily aimed at XP users but it's still applicable to anyone who's tired of Windows 10 and all its privacy issues being shoved down their throats.

I can understand Microsoft wanting to get the switchover done as expeditiously as posible so they don't have to provide extended support for four operating systems at once longer than absolutely necessary, but this is just getting ridiculous.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Realistically they're never going to outcompete Windows 7 with the new generation of OSes (8 and 10), because Windows 7 "just works" on a desktop or laptop computer to a high degree- it was a worthy successor to XP. They can build up a huge market share with 10 on mobile devices and by bundling it with new computers, but there are still people using XP for backwards compatibility with critical software; Windows 7 is going to last until 2020 at the earliest.

And for crying out loud- XP was supported for thirteen years. Windows 7 has only been out for six years and Microsoft's already trying to bury it. They got away with doing that for Windows 95 and '98, but that was back in the late '90s and early '00s when there were useful reasons for businesses to upgrade and replace their computers every couple of years.

Nowadays, it really is more desirable to keep hardware around for several years, because it is good enough for most end-user applications in the business world. Tablets and so on are supplanting the desktop/laptop ecosystem but strike me as unlikely to replace it outright in commerce, if only because there are so many jobs where you're going to be sitting at a desk anyway and making the computers more portable is just an invitation to accidental damage, theft, and losses.*

So there are literally hundreds of millions if not billions of machines out there running Windows 7 that work just fine for almost every application their owners could desire, and upgrading to the new operating system has very few advantages for them. By contrast, there were much better reasons to upgrade from Windows 95 to '98 to XP.

If they try to bury Windows 7 and cut off support for it in the next few years, the main effect is to communicate to consumers that the longevity of XP as a supported platform was a fluke- Windows wants to force you to buy a new set of licenses every five years as a business policy and doesn't actually care about giving you an OS that will run your business's key specialized software consistently for the next decade.
___________________________

*Please grill me lightly if you disagree; I came by this opinion honestly but accept that I may be wrong.

That is not a realistic lifespan for commercial users; when a business invests large sums of money in a new operating system

[Zaune]

Actually, I get the very distinct impression that XP was a fluke, or at least that Microsoft wanted to wind up support in favour of something that could run in 64-bit but couldn't because Vista went down like the name of a famous English rock band.

[TheFeniX]

And for crying out loud- XP was supported for thirteen years. Windows 7 has only been out for six years and Microsoft's already trying to bury it. They got away with doing that for Windows 95 and '98, but that was back in the late '90s and early '00s when there were useful reasons for businesses to upgrade and replace their computers every couple of years.

To be fair, the backwards compatibility of 2000Pro and XP likely had a lot to do with that. Up through XP, beating old DOS programs (especially those for school systems and medical records) into shape and getting old dial-up modems to function on them wasn't all that difficult. XP needed a lot of work to get to where it needed to be (two service packs out of 3 to be blunt), but it was still a fast and stable operating system. Vista was pretty much a non-starter. The lack of backwards compatibility was the least of it's issues. The operating system itself could bring the latest hardware to it's knees. Windows 7 (and even 8 ) run better on equivalent hardware.

Really, the only reason for a lot of it's traction was major PC distributors selling it at launch. Dell had to fight all the returns by offering XP downgrade CDs it was so bad.

Windows 8's problem(s) is that it was a better operating system, just not "better enough." It's basically just a flat-out better OS than Windows 7, but it's also hamstrung by hiding all that goodness under a GUI designed for a 5-year-old. Even now, it's really not a "sit at my desk and get shit done" operating system.

They finally (with Windows 10) have an Operating System that Windows 8 should have been (Windows 7, but better in every way). Pretty sure the hardware requirements are the same for 10 as they are for 7, and that's actually impressive, at least to me. A shame about how I'm now spending time cutting out the spying bullshit. Aside from that, and the bullshit with the VPN, I've got no regrets on W10. Like, just the W10 GUI tacked on to W8 would have shut-up 99% of the complaints about the Operating System.

[Grumman]

Windows 8's problem(s) is that it was a better operating system, just not "better enough." It's basically just a flat-out better OS than Windows 7, but it's also hamstrung by hiding all that goodness under a GUI designed for a 5-year-old. Even now, it's really not a "sit at my desk and get shit done" operating system.

They finally (with Windows 10) have an Operating System that Windows 8 should have been (Windows 7, but better in every way). Pretty sure the hardware requirements are the same for 10 as they are for 7, and that's actually impressive, at least to me. A shame about how I'm now spending time cutting out the spying bullshit. Aside from that, and the bullshit with the VPN, I've got no regrets on W10. Like, just the W10 GUI tacked on to W8 would have shut-up 99% of the complaints about the Operating System.

Please consider what you are saying. The problem with Windows 8 is not that it was "not better enough", and Windows 10 is not "better in every way" than Windows 7. An OS that forces you to spend time disabling built-in spyware is worse in at least one way than one that does not.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not saying Windows 10 is an inferior product. I'm saying that commercial customers would generally prefer not to have to switch operating systems and shell out for new licenses every five years just to humor Microsoft's desire to terminate support for their old products.

I have heard it said that this is actually a major problem for Microsoft for at least the past decade. Now that everyone and their dog owns a computer or six, Microsoft's biggest competitor is past versions of their own profits- the biggest competitor for new versions of Office is old versions of Office, the biggest competitor for Windows 7 was XP, and so on.