The original post made some extraordinary claims, and I'm not seeing anything to the degree they claimed. To be sure, Windows 10 shares more data with Microsoft than I'd be comfortable with, particularly if Cortana is enabled, but it doesn't seem to be anything like the levels described in the article. I wish the original poster had posted more about the type of traffic he was seeing, the specific requests, or even his methodology for testing.
The only dubious behavior I observed was sending every keystroke in the Windows Start Menu to the servers, but I understand that combined Computer/Web search is being sold as a feature, and this is necessary for that feature. I don't know why all the metadata is needed, and it's possibly excessive, but this isn't the keylogger the original post claimed.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to disprove his claims, but if it's as bad as suggested, reproducing it should've been possible, and I've been unable to reproduce it. I encourage others to try it as well -- if enough of us do it, it should be possible to either confirm or strongly refute the original claims.
A valid point. Nonetheless, there seems to be a lot more hyperbole and paranoia than facts on the ground on this one - supposedly, there's 67 million installs of Windows 10. Assuming they're all "listening" at 64kbps, that's 8terabits per second of bandwidth that just popped up across the network... and I'm no network engineer, but I suspect there'd be discussion of that.
I've been trying to stay out of the anti-windows postings here, it's not really something I'm interested in fighting about online. But I want to add a few facts to the mix that no one is discussing. Microsoft recently laid off most of their test engineers. Obviously they are not going to stop testing. They've been pushing for a more data / feedback customer model. From this article All this telemetry they are collecting is just them trying to shift their quality model. It's totally valid to criticize how they are doing that or their communication about it. But some of the totally baseless tinfoil hat stuff that gets booped around here is pretty silly. TLDR - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.His email also makes it clear that Microsoft is making changes to the way it develops products by streamlining its engineering process and focusing around data and applied science and software engineering across its teams. Each engineering group inside the company will be focusing on making better use of telemetry data in terms of predictive analysis and measurable outcomes.
It could be, if they set up the server on the other end to capture it. But that's still only the stuff you type to the start menu.I don't know why all the metadata is needed, and it's possibly excessive, but this isn't the keylogger the original post claimed.