Windows 11 Collects an Awful Lot of Telemetry About Your PC
Windows 11 Collects an Awful Lot of Telemetry About Your PC
The analysis of network traffic by Windows 11 motivated the researcher to wonder if Windows itself is now spyware.
Not the most of informative of articles - 'Windows 11 tries to look up some URLs when you first install it'. Probably all that shit that they've added to the Start menu, by the looks of it.
MS have an article about the 'diagnostic' data that they send - that's far from all that they collect, they count 'telemetry' separately. Some things, like recording your CPU model number to see if it's particularly associated with specific driver crashes? Fine. Collecting specific URLs that you've connected to in your browser? I'd be much less happy about that. And the article implies they're collecting about a gigabyte per month of just 'diagnostic' data - one, that seems a lot, and two, you're paying to store and upload it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-data-viewer-overview
Happy to stay on Linux - I might not have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean that I've got anything to share.
I'm not sure where you got the "1GB per month" part, but all it says is that will use up to 1gb of data on your drive. That's up to, and it's not all being uploaded. I would think that much is obvious. It's also data that gets purged by storage sense when your drive storage is low so you aren't really "paying to store or" this is also something you are asked if you want to do when installing windows, very similar to just about every mainstream Linux distro out there. Not to mention every Linux distro is also pinging various URLs when you first boot it so I don't know why that's not upsetting you
This is clickbait bullshit. I've seen this stupid fucking article posted on Reddit like 9 million times. I thought Lemmy would be better :-/.
While Windows does collect a ton of telemetry (out of the box), this specific article gives like zero useful information. The fact that Windows queries msn.com means literally fucking nothing without picking apart the traffic to see what is actually being sent. It probably pings that domain for the weather widget or something.
Yeah this is honestly pretty disappointing considering how its coming from a security researcher, the number of requests being sent means absolutely nothing. What matters is the data being sent, not the frequency. Windows 11 sending more requests than 10, does not inherently mean its less private.
edit: wow it wasn't even a clean install, he just got some random laptop and used it out of the box.
Windows itself has been spyware since NT 4. It's gotten worse over the years, but it hasn't been non-malicious in a very long time.
OMG hot take! Let me guess, you use Linux?
Windows 10 will collect keylogging and send it all to Microsoft. So yeah, it's spyware before we get to Win11.
Hey, for someone building a new PC and wants to install Windows, would you guys still recommend installing 10 over 11?
I would not. 11 is ok to use nowadays.
No I'd go with 11 at this point. It's basically the exact same thing as 10 (with a few regedit tweaks) but they added stuff. Also if you have an HDR monitor you 100% need win11. Win10 HDR is complete dogshit. They are only actively adding HDR features into win11.
If you get Windows 11 make sure to get the Pro version for more control (like turning off ads).
And that's why my media pc is on win 7, and everything else is on a Linux distro :)
Fuck Microsoft