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We have a right to know the whats, whys and hows.

We have a right to know the whats, whys and hows.

What? No, we don't. Where does it say we have a right to know corporate secrets?

We have the right to know what data they are pulling off of our drives, why they are pulling that data and how it will be used along with who will be viewing/receiving that data. These are not corporate secrets, or shouldn't be.

The data being sent is encrypted, so I doubt a tool would help.

The data being sent is encrypted, so I doubt a tool would help.

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

First they came...

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

My view is:

• I don't like the increasing trends of invasion-of-privacy-for-targeted-ads.
• Microsoft's legal ambiguity is to cover their butt from regular consumer lawsuits, I don't think its malicious.
• "Lack of clarity" is Microsoft's modus operandi. Not out of maliciousness, but from a lack of internal corporate cohesiveness. Different departments in Microsoft fight against each other and don't fully know what the others are doing. This may change in the future with the new CEO, but for the past 20 years it's looked like that whenever the curtains were pulled back.
• What Microsoft is actually doing, consumer-wise, is nothing that Google and Apple and everyone else already have been doing for years. I don't really like it, but I want to use their products anyway, and just opt-out of everything I can.
• As little as a trust these companies, the hierarchy of evil goes: Amazon < Microsoft < Google < Apple < Facebook < Soviet Russia. Microsoft is on the 'less evil, but still evil' side. Microsoft has way more antitrust eyeballs on them to be openly malicious, and further, they are far too little organized to be successfully malicious when they are malicious. I trust Microsoft's clumsiness and unfocusedness, as well as the antitrust monitoring, to make any attempted "subtle" attempts at maliciousness easily apparent.
• As far as real NSA spying goes, we already know Microsoft pretty much sends NSA everything the NSA asks for, even without EULAs.
• As far as consumer spying-for-ads goes, it doesn't matter if Microsoft said "We promise not to collect data for anything except feeding bunnies", they could be lying and nobody would know the difference. Or, they could be telling the truth, decide to change their policy, and change their EULA without informing you. All these EULAs have clauses that say, "We can change this agreement in the future without further notice". Essentially, the EULA doesn't matter anyway. The only times it does matter is when a company explicitly says what evil thing they are doing. Then the only choice is to stop using their service/software.

The writing was on the wall eight years ago; unless there is a dramatic changing of the guards, this trend won't change. I've mostly already made up my mind on the course of action I'll take moving forward, and Win10 is no worse than what we've already been seeing.