Replies

[Mr. Austin]

satrow wrote:

Older but worth a look to see what you’re up against with W10: Privacy Implications of Windows 10 Telemetry: Summary Stats and Conclusions

This report is based on traffic recording of virtual machine with Windows 10, which was run continuously for 346 days, from 2017-02-15 to 2018-01-27. After the installation, Windows 10 was left alone. This OS had default settings and was running without any third party software installed.

That’s a really good post. Thanks. It exposes some very significant Microsoft policies.

Now, if one thinks about what Microsoft is doing, they can also very cleverly interpolate and extrapolate myriad facts you might not think would even be possible. In the few years since that was compiled, machine learning and AI have had significant advances which very few of us have taken the time to look into. Examples at the top of my own mind? If Ben Goertzel and tribe are doing what they are at Singularity.net, and if Hanson Robotics is doing what they are, then Microsoft’s behemoth, hegemonous wallet can’t be that far behind those examples.

My own decisions about my private data come down to a philosophy that the devil I ‘know’  — and with whom I already do business  —  is better than the devil whose policies I don’t know. Of course every policy has its limits.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

jabeattyauditor wrote:

Michael, please don’t take this as argumentative, as it’s not meant in that spirit…

If you go the Enterprise licensing route, aren’t you still putting yourself in much the same position – the bottom line being that you’ll still have to trust Microsoft to do what it promises, and you won’t have the tools to be certain they’re living up to that promise.

You’d be trading Microsoft’s promise that it’s collecting impersonal information and not using it nefariously (Windows 10 Pro) for Microsoft’s promise that it won’t collect that information (Windows 10 Enterprise).

Is there a reason you’d trust one promise over the other?

Yes, there’d be a reason why I’d provisionally trust one promise over the other:  what they agree to in writing in their marketing and sales materials and in their licensing agreement. None of those will be simple to read or even especially clear. But that’s a cost of time and a cost of biz with a rapacious company culture like that of Microsoft’s.

But what they agree to in writing is what I’d go with. At least you’ve then got a potential means of recourse if they change something.

That doesn’t mean you want to trust them perpetually without annual audits of their policies which suit their purposes. But that goes for any company. Any written agreement is only as effective as the people upholding or undermining it.

[Mr. Austin]

Kathy Stevens wrote:

Thanks to everyone who has participated in this discussion.

Clearly, it will be difficult to impossible to avoid telemetry by Microsoft, HP, and others.

Over the coming weeks we will follow the development of software designed to address the issue.

We will also review our other options including unplugging our Intel® Xeon® work horses from the internet altogether, reexamining how we use our LAN, and work on ways to mask the identities for each of our machines.

Longer term, we will review our policy of purchasing PCs from major manufacturers such as HP vs. building our own in shop.

We are also examining our internet usage by app (Windows Settings>Network & Internet>Data usage). We were surprised to find that on one of our PCs 68 apps had Ethernet usage histories.

Of the 68 the third highest usage was by “System”.

My quick and incomplete search of Windows Enterprise licensing shows that in 2016 five or more workstation licenses must be purchased at maybe $90 annually each. I don’t imagine those costs have remained the same. Given everything else you’ve written, and appreciating the levels of fiddly, cobbled tech support you’d need to suppress Microsoft’s telemetry, it seems like if Enterprise truly allows you to block telemetry, getting licensed for that could be a cost-effective solution compared to devoting research and configuration time for other strategies.

If I were doing that, I’d also be interested in how much other overhead and configuration Enterprise licensing would introduce.

Here’s another summary page which suggests a table of costs.

For several years I’ve run my own perfectly serviceable volume license version of Office 2010 Professional Plus.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

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Kathy Stevens

[Mr. Austin]

Kathy Stevens wrote:

Enterprise

Thanks for your summation, Kathy. You covered all the tools anyone mentioned. From what I’ve seen so far in this thread I started it looks like Ask Woody participants know several very good Windows-only anti-telemetry tools. But those tools also require significant thought and intervention to make them work properly. That means to me that unless someone points out a new tool which no one had mentioned, I’ll use one of those mentioned.

Based on the very clear trail of Microsoft’s changes across recent years it also looks to me like I’d prefer not to be their subscriber for much longer. I’d take me and many others with me to different platforms where our private data can be private, and not subjected to the surreptitious prying of companies who feel they own our private data.

I also noticed that no one has mentioned Linux or Apple platforms.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

Bluetrix wrote:

Kathy Stevens wrote:

Does anyone else use Spybot anti-beacon?

I used it pre v1809, then I switched to O&Oshutup which had better control options and descriptions of what it did. imho

Now I use  Glasswire paid version.  Requires user observation to block MS “spying”, but does a lot of other things.

For a just “click and stop” program try both O&O and Spybot.  Then choose, both work to a degree.

Glasswire looks like a promising software. I might try it and thank you for suggesting it.

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Bluetrix

Kathy Stevens wrote:

Kathy

Thank you for your participation and guidance in these discussions Kathy. Given the timbre of what I’d seen so far on Ask Woody I didn’t expect that someone like you would be a participant on this website. The discussions about having expert IT people perform workarounds to divert telemetry instead of stopping it are mildly interesting. Yet I don’t see them as my preferred solution. I still prefer a single 3rd party software which is designed to implement all the anti-telemetry choices I make for myself or the people with whom I share the software.

I see many pitfalls with trying to divert the telemetry because those strategies will involve tricky levels of granularity which will need consistent, regular process design and management by one of more IT experts. I see that as a game of Whac-a-Mole which I prefer not to play.

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Kathy Stevens

[Mr. Austin]

anonymous wrote:

Windows 10 Pro, although it does collect telemetry, transmits it over SSL in an encrypted form.  They use it for their own purposes, and one assumes hand it to law enforcement, but there is no proof they have or will sell it to anyone.

Ccleaner is owned by the company that owns Avast.  The company has been proven to have sold user data.  So, I would not rely on Ccleaner to try to and help the situation.

Many programs appear capable to block much of the Windows telemetry.  O&O Shutup10 is from a reputable company who made a famous defrag software.  WPD has a better and simpler interface.  If you use WPD, and in privacy pick “disable all” but not advanced, and in blocker pick “spy” but not the others, I think that does a pretty good job without a lot of complicated steps.  Do a system backup first, of course.

Although Windows 10 Pro does not have it, Windows 10 Enterprise has a setting to pick telemetry level none instead of basic.

There’s no proof? I don’t require proof that any company with a record of rapacious, sometimes predatory capitalism doesn’t intend to do dirty deeds with their power. And would I recommend to Home or Pro Windows users that they shell out the cost of 5 Windows seat licenses to stop telemetry so they could use the block telemetry option of Enterprise? No. Although it’s helpful that you pointed that out and I thank you because I didn’t know.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

Most telemetry data will be misused because laws governing its use are intentionally skewed towards the companies which assemble and sell it, and/or because there inadequate or inadequately enforced laws about them.

Shoshona Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, mentions a group who had a look at scale and scope of the now ubiquitous, interdependent, clickwrap licensing of software publishers and cloud data companies like Google and facebook. My recollection of what she said is that if an individual user were to read all of the clickwraps and their inter-related licenses one uses, it would take over a year of full-time work to sort through upwards of 1,000 pages of software agreements. So are those ethical agreements? No. Were they ever? No.

This environment did not exist at time DOS and the Windows OS series were conceived and released.

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Fred, Ascaris

[Mr. Austin]

anonymous wrote:

To anyone who feels capable to understand it, did the Avast license permit and make legal the way they sold data through Jumpshot?  Computer scientists often say that most anonymized or de-identified data can easily be reassociated with a unique, even known person.  Does GDPR change your answer to the above, if the customer is in Europe?

It seems your questions are phrased rhetorically. No, its my understanding that Avast never explained to its end-users what they’d do with their private data or their data exhaust, or ask them for permission. And GDPR should change nothing — unless US law prefers to continue its policies of encouraging the widespread use of our personal data without reasonable consent.

From what I’ve seen the new surveillance capitalisms had many precursors. One that came to mind was very old data clearinghouse MetroMail. You could give them an unsorted list of personal names, and they could easily match your list with their databases to find out where you lived, your private telephone number, your likely range of income and personal net worth, and many other things. Did most people find that kind’a creepy? Yes. Were MetroMail’s programs used to sell you things against your own interests. No.

These days machine learning and AI create new, completely different, heretofore unimagined opportunities and problems. And by their plodding nature the governments which were meant to look after our privacy interests are hopelessly outgunned and outpaced by the boundaryless, international, virtual nation states of many giant companies.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

Alex5723 wrote:

Mr. Austin wrote:

This looks like a really good app

I run Lockdown, which is a sort of ‘proxy/vpn/firewall’ on my iPhone and iPad.

Thank you. I’ve used THIS and Bitdefender for that with good results on iOS.

 

Edited for content.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Nathan Parker

[Mr. Austin]

Charlie wrote:

I’ve been using the Adobe Reader for a long time and have always liked it – up until they came out with the DC version.  Now it won’t even update itself.  So I’m looking for a good reliable, hopefully less bloated alternative.  Suggestions would be very much appreciated.

For many years I’ve been a fan and user of Tracker Software’s PDF X-Change Editor. Excellent software, excellent support, for a very good price.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Mr. Austin.

Bluetrix wrote:

Rick Corbett wrote:

For those of you who use the Windows Update Blocker to stop and prevent any further Windows Updates to Windows 10, this tool was updated to v1.2 on 21st April.

Hope this helps…

@Rick-Corbett,
Thanks for the update on WUB from v1.1
As I posted Here, there are several programs that do this, WUB included, it’s not an all inclusive list.

WUB is among the easiest to understand and use, imho.

Wowzers! Thank you! 🙂

In replacing a single, dedicated copper fax line I found and use Nextiva’s vFax. $50 annually for one license in our case.

Thank you for this thread. I’d yesterday started experimenting with this program and found…

I’d prefer a tool which remembers its persistent settings, and

which has a design philosophy which aggregates decisions for me

and this tool is astoundingly granular – I don’t know enough about Win 10’s telemetries to know what I’ll break when I make changes, and I’d prefer a publisher which automates that for me.

 

Thank you, PKCano. I’d not done that yet. Now I will 😉

I had searched the words “update blocker” in the main site search box and seemed to find only one post with those terms in it.