With everything being “connected” these days we all expect
there to be some loss of privacy when we are online with our computers,
smartphones and tablets. But for the most part we assume control over what our
devices are sending to who…or at least some control.
With the new Windows 10 out in full force Microsoft is
pushing hard to get it on as many devices as possible as you may have noticed
from the constant upgrade popups on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. But
with the new operating system comes some new privacy concerns it seems. If you
do a clean installation yourself you will notice that there are many privacy
settings you can turn off or on to help keep your data to yourself. There are
settings for location data, contact information, error reporting and so on. If
you turn all these off you would think that your information is not going
anywhere. Apparently that is not the case.
Even with all the privacy setting in place it seems that
Windows 10 is talking to Microsoft servers and sending them information
thousands of times per day. Even when using a third party tool called
DisableWinTracking Microsoft was still able to “phone home”. So you may be
thinking that you didn’t sign up for this but apparently you did. The Microsoft
end user license agreement (EULA) you sign to when you install
Windows 10 states they have the right to collect user data from your computer
and we all know that nobody reads those to begin with. But this doesn’t mean
that Microsoft should have the right to track our computer usage especially
after saying they aren’t.
