A future crackpot
I am deadly serious. For a growing and very localized number of people, Windows 10 is simply a reality in 1984. They are convinced that with Windows 10, Microsoft has developed a system of espionage ever seen since the Cold War, putting his hand on every detail of our lives and repatriating these data in Redmond for who knows what nefarious purposes.
It will take them many
foil
They are wildly misinformed or deliberately agitated. Unless, of course, they are just crazy, which is possible if I believe what I read. And they are swept up in a frenzy or at least passively helped by the tech press. And that, unfortunately, includes ZDNet, which earlier this week took over the incendiary allegation posted on Reddit by an individual claiming an obscure torrent tracker, iTS:
Microsoft has decided to revoke any data protection and to grab whatever they can collect not only for themselves but also for others. One of them is one of the largest companies fight against piracy called MarkMonitor. Among other things, Windows 10 sends the contents of your local disks directly to one of their servers.
This is wrong. It is even widely in contradiction with the facts. I keep an eye on a handful of sites torrent established, larger than those who complain here, and none of them seem to have a problem with Windows 10.
This statement is literally groundless. But when a simple lie is repeated often enough, he finally anchored in the collective unconscious.
This strange belief that Windows 10 is a spy tool keeps popping up among the followers of the conspiracy theory. Via email, a reader sent me a link to a rant by a practitioner of alternative medicine, apparently as an expert legal and IT
The new Windows license agreement 10 … gives Microsoft permission to suck any given particle of the hard drive of a doctor. This will include the confidential doctor-patient emails that are stored on, all reports, any invoice or short note to staff exchanged via internal messaging [...]
No Doc, this n ‘ not. Here, take a sip of this soothing tea and talk, okay? And also invite the guy torrent because he needs someone explain what is really happening.
These two poor ignorant souls and a lot of other people like them form their conclusions on a paragraph in Microsoft’s new unified privacy policy. The clause lists the conditions under which Microsoft “will access, preserve or disclose personal information, including your content (like the content of your emails, or other private communications file in your private folders) …”
This short list of requirements includes legal requirements such as warrants, subpoenas and (probably) national security orders and actions needed to “help prevent loss of life or serious injury” or to end attacks against Microsoft services.
And these terms apply only to the content stored online through Microsoft services. Here is the beginning of the contract, one that defines the content covered by the clause. This section of the contract is clearly blocked by aluminum foil and invisible to the brigade Microsoft you-spy:
“We collect the contents of your files and communications where is necessary to provide the service that you use This includes:.. the content of your documents, photos, music or video you upload to a Microsoft service as onedrive This also includes the content of your communications sent or received using Microsoft Services
…
So yes, if you send or receive email using the services for individuals from Microsoft or if you store files on onedrive, there is a risk that address a court summons on Microsoft forcing him to pass this information.
But there is no risk that Microsoft collects the contents of your local hard drives and sends them to anyone. Zero.
Microsoft is under a microscope constantly, every gesture is considered by security experts and privacy advocates. Windows 10 was available in pre-release for nearly 10 months and final version for roughly six weeks, from build 10240 out mid-July.
One might think that if these 75 million hard drives had been emptied, someone would have noticed. But so far not a word from a person able to use a network analyzer. Because nothing like this has happened.
In fact, the precise conditions in which the good doctor is indignant are completely banal. Any company offering modern IT service uses a relatively similar language in its confidentiality agreement. Compare these extracts the privacy policies of Google, Apple and Microsoft.
It is certainly true that Windows 10 is based on online services a greater degree than in previous versions of Windows. So goes the world, especially one in which a billion people carry with them the terminals which literally record each time and transmit to multinational telecommunications.
We want personalized services . We expect relevant search results. We expect the devices we use daily that they are more intelligent and useful over time. We expect them to understand despite our accents when we use voice functions. We expect that the bugs in the software and services will be corrected as soon yesterday.
All of these goals require clients to agree to share data with companies providing these services with a commitment matching the recipient of these data protection with care and use them only for the intended purposes.
After you have carefully read the Microsoft Service Agreement, the Windows license agreement Microsoft’s privacy statement, I do not see anything remotely resembling Big Brother.
If you run a small medical office and are subject to governance HIPAA, I hope you do not buy at Walmart your PC to connect to your business network and hope that everything will go well. I also hope that you do not rely on an angry chiropractor to tell you how to configure your network. Any company that cares about security, it is managed by competent persons or regulated by law, should turn to a professional IT to set its communications and infrastructure systems.
If you do not understand that, then I’m not sure that the foil itself supports you.
Google has long been trying to encourage advertisers to migrate their content to HTML5 technologies and abandon the tool from Adobe for their inserts: as such it offers a tool to automatically convert Flash content in the HTML5 and tools equivalent to those wishing to make their own transition.