So you seriously, honestly think you are a high profile enough target for them to personally be reading the contents of your hard disk and stealing your project?

I think you're missing the point WC is making. It doesn't matter whether or not he's a high enough target. All that matters is they can see what you're doing at any point in time.

However, the fact remains that I make my living in the field of software development, and as such, I don't have the ability to refuse to use the majority operating system purely out of principle.

That's the biggest problem, Windows has a de-facto monopoly which you cannot easily (or at all) get around.

The government spies on people via their telephone calls. Have you stopped using the telephone? Or switched to prepaid burner phones that you rotate on a weekly basis? If not, I'd say you are being a tad hypocritical about Windows telemetry.

Here, I don't agree. I do of course still use a phone, but this doesn't compare, in at least two ways.

First, you decide whether you use the phone at all, when you use it, whom you call, and what you say on the phone. In my case, there is nothing I say on the phone, that I would deem necessary to hide (except as a matter of principle). But the point is, I could have secrets that I don't want anyone to know, and I would be able to keep them secret, simply by not talking to them over the phone.

With Windows 10's espionage features, you do not have that choice. You do not decide when you send something over the network, or what, or to whom. Now of course you might say "but if you don't have any terror plans on your computer in the first place, you need not fear". That's wrong. You also need to fear if you have anything personal on your computer, or anything business-related, or anything of a dozen other categories, none of which are unlawful in any way.

Got an entirely legitimate explicit picture that your girlfriend gave you? Right, who cares if some wanker at the Microsoft datacenter who is bored during night shift browses user files because he can. Who cares if he uses the picture to jerk off. Maybe he's more pervert than that, well good job that he will find her address in the cloud, too. Who cares if he uploads that photo on some shady internet site.
Who cares that you did three researches for prostate cancer on the internet last week, using a private browser and an anonymizing proxy (except Windows also logged your keystrokes!). Sure, nobody cares, except maybe your private health insurance who will pay a company like MS to provide such information ahead of time so they can terminate the contracts of people who are about to get cost-intensive interventions.

You could as well have brought up Facebook (which I'm not using) instead of owning and using a phone. People nowadays post a lot of sensitive information on there, which goes beyond my comprehension. But either way, it is their own fucking decision to do that. If you are just stupid, then well... nobody can help you. But you hardly get around using a Windows computer for work (surely for development, anyway).

That's difference #1. Lawful, innocent people have a lot of entirely legitimate reasons to keep secrets and not have the entire world know every detail about their lives, and they can keep these secrets despite using a medium like the phone (or Facebook) since they are in control of disclosure or non-disclosure. Simply don't post on Facebook what you don't want everybody to know. It's your responsibility, and that's only fair since it's your life.

Now to the second, equally important difference. Let's assume that I am indeed a dangerous criminal or terrorist, or worse: a socialist. If someone was a criminal, I would not just tolerate, but I would even want governmental forces to wiretap this phone, and I wouldn't want them to stop there. After all, it's their job to protect the citizens from harm. It's their job to protect me from harm. At least, that is what it should be.

But there needs to be a reasonable need that justifies doing this, and before they wiretap my phone (or anyone's phone) they must have fucking compelling evidence that I'm almost certainly a bad guy. It is not OK to do this with people who are innocent, under no conditions.

There is no such thing as "Alright, let's just eavesdrop on everybody, maybe we find something...". This is Gestapo procedure, and strictly not compatible with the spirit (and laws) of nations that call themselves "free" and "constitutional state".

Now, what Microsoft is doing, they're doing that exact thing but they're a privately held company. They are not even a governmental institution which might have an excuse like "uh... keep up civil order, prevent terror strikes...", and they have no controlling mechanism whatsoever. They do just what they want, and they do it because they expect to make some extra money from it.

They have no legitimate reason whatsoever of looking at your activity or even your files, and they are exploiting their de-facto monopoly.

Besides, I am convinced that their EULA is contra bonos mores, which means that what they're doing is not only wrong, but also strictly illegal. Maybe not in the USA where you can seemingly agree on pretty much everything, but surely in the EU.

There is no such thing as "Alright, let's just eavesdrop on everybody, maybe we find something...". This is Gestapo procedure, and strictly not compatible with the spirit (and laws) of nations that call themselves "free" and "constitutional state".

Well, right. But that's exactly what the NSA has been doing for the better part of a decade. To emails as well as phone calls.

There is no such thing as "Alright, let's just eavesdrop on everybody, maybe we find something...". This is Gestapo procedure, and strictly not compatible with the spirit (and laws) of nations that call themselves "free" and "constitutional state".

Well, right. But that's exactly what the NSA has been doing for the better part of a decade. To emails as well as phone calls.

Might I add to this by giving the London Ring of Steel and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative as some of the more extreme examples in "Free" countries.

There is no such thing as "Alright, let's just eavesdrop on everybody, maybe we find something...". This is Gestapo procedure, and strictly not compatible with the spirit (and laws) of nations that call themselves "free" and "constitutional state".

Well, right. But that's exactly what the NSA has been doing for the better part of a decade. To emails as well as phone calls.

I am of course aware of that. But as much as I think that this is wrong, there are still different shades of "wrong".

What the NSA (and every other spy agency / police / others) are doing is clearly wrong. It's anticonstitutional, so by the oath that they have sworn to defend against external as well as internal enemies, they would need to shoot each other or commit suicide immediately (since they're being anticonstitutional, they are internal enemies). Needless to say that this isn't going to happen.

But all that aside, at least in the idea of an ideal world (a world where politicians don't fill their pockets and where the police exists to protect and help you), they still have a "kind of justification" for what they are doing. If we were to believe them (none of us probably does!) they do it as a necessary evil to protect our freedom and our lives from much worse enemies. Yes, that's not what is really happening, but it is the rose-colored sunglass idea of it.
And heck, if maybe, just maybe, they indeed catch one or two terrorists per year before they kill a few people (you must believe that this is the case, or you are bound to despair), then that still isn't an excuse for being anticonstitutional, it doesn't justify abusing the rights of millions of innocent people, and it doesn't turn wrong into right. But it turns a really vicious wrong into a slightly less vicious wrong.

None of that applies to Microsoft. They are a purely profit-driven private company, and they have no such justification, slim as it may be, at hand.

So, on my "wrongness scale" going from 0 to 10, what the NSA is doing is somewhere in the range 8-9, but what Microsoft is doing is 11.

So, on my "wrongness scale" going from 0 to 10, what the NSA is doing is somewhere in the range 8-9, but what Microsoft is doing is 11.

Your rose-tinted glasses and mine do not align.

Both are evil, sure. But Microsoft is a for-profit private entity. It exists to increase shareholder value. What's the worst damage they are going to do to me? Show me targeted advertising? Sell me software upgrades?

I'm certainly not concerned about Microsoft's private security forces storming my house and taking me off to a black site...

It's precisely because Microsoft are a private, for-profit company that primarily relies on revenue from software licensing to exist, and is beholden to it's shareholders, that I tend to trust them considerably more than certain other companies. Microsoft know which side their bread is buttered on, they know that if they engage in practices that will have a negative impact on their profits then they're going to be in a place they don't want to be. Microsoft are after all the company who are currently fighting the US government over privacy issues, because they know that if they lose that case they'll be in deep trouble in the EU. How that fits into the paranoid three-part-fantasy-epic some are spinning about Windows 10, I sure don't know.

[...] are a private, for-profit company that primarily relies on revenue from software licensing to exist, and is beholden to it's shareholders

Bolded parts mine. Maybe it's my sleeplessness speaking but the bolded parts of the quote seem to fit fine with another company as well. VW. They have recently been in the news. For doing something extremely predictably dumb which is not only likely to cost a lot of money, but also consumer trust and was kind of a really bad move, morally speaking.

Personally I have made contrary experiences. Publicly traded companies tend to have a purely for-profit view of things and that view has a tendency to focus on the extreme short term. I have had some long-termish experiences in another hobby of mine and if any of the companies involved decided that going public was a good idea, I would cut my losses at that point in time. I have seen how that goes before and I'd much rather take my business elsewhere. Everyone needs to pay the bills and make money but given the choice I would much rather trust a private non-public company over a public one.

Granted, that's a bit more difficult in the field of technology but when that guy who provided an encrypted email service who happened to have Edward Snowden among his customers was forced to release his keys he instead pulled the plug on the whole service. That was probably not a smart economic move but regarding integrity and standing up for your customers it was admirable. The publicly traded tech giants on the other hand mostly decided to roll over.

Why do they feel the need to log keystrokes and ferret away private files to a server? What private information are they collecting that could possibly be of use to a third party and what third parties are they sharing this info with? Why the secrecy in what they collect? If this is truly benign, then some transparency is in order. At the very least, give a log showing what was transmitted for user inspection.

Are you involved in treason or sedition via email? Is your hard drive full of pirated software or kiddy porn?

Worse, I'm directly responsible for a few hundred million HIPAA medical records, and routinely work with payments. Microsoft can't guarantee me 100% security in their servers, and having another avenue of attack open is completely unnacceptable for me for an OS.

I'm directly responsible for a decision to upgrade our (several hundred) computers to windows 10, and unless Microsoft gives me a 100% guarantee that they'll take all legal liability if anything happens, it's a no go.

As for what I'll do when the point comes when Windows 7 is unmaintained, some of our developers already use Macs (They requested them). Maybe we'll become a Mac office (As much as I hate them).

The government spies on people via their telephone calls. Have you stopped using the telephone? Or switched to prepaid burner phones that you rotate on a weekly basis? If not, I'd say you are being a tad hypocritical about Windows telemetry.

In our office, yes, actually. Personally, I have no social media presence on any site. If you look up my real name (Which is very unique), there are no results with me in them.

So you seriously, honestly think you are a high profile enough target for them to personally be reading the contents of your hard disk and stealing your project?

SOMEONE is high profile enough for them to do that. That's the issue. We have no way of knowing if it's me or you. That's up to Microsoft to determine.

Yeah, I'm sure MS has nothing better to do with its billions than to spy on every windows user, personally view and decide what to do with every file ever created and get away with mass theft of intellectual property.

I'm also sure that the government has nothing better to do either.

First, the NSA pays microsoft to do it. It's a business, they comply and get paid.

The government really doesn't have anything better to do. Look at the NSA and it's massive data centers.

WiredCat, on 08 Nov 2015 - 12:52 PM, said:

potentially they can even steal you bank account
Why would they? What would a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation care about the small amount of money in your personal bank account?

Because Chinese hackers have been trying to bruteforce my paypal for around 5 years now, and you can be 100% sure they'll try to crack into microsoft as well. If they manage to crack it, Microsoft assumes no liability.

Well, right. But that's exactly what the NSA has been doing for the better part of a decade. To emails as well as phone calls.

I'm voting for Rand Paul, what else can I do?

It's precisely because Microsoft are a private, for-profit company that primarily relies on revenue from software licensing to exist, and is beholden to it's shareholders, that I tend to trust them considerably more than certain other companies.

http://gizmodo.com/confirmed-nsa-paid-google-microsoft-others-millions-1188615332?trending_test_b&utm_expid=66866090-62.H_y_0o51QhmMY_tue7bevQ.2&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

Insurance Company: "Hey Microsoft, here's some money, think you can give us the searches/files this guy's searched recently? We think he talked with a doctor about a potential cancer"

Microsoft: "Well sure, buddy, after all, we are a for-profit company that is aiming to rely on marketing data collection for our revenue!"