For people who say you should read the contract before agreeing to it. What about the hundreds of thousands? No, millions of people buying new windows laptops every year. Are they presented with any kind of agreement? I don't think so.
They are. It is a huge problem that companies are allowed to do clickwrap bullshit with no human-comprehensible summary. But people are agreeing to this stuff.
From my experience Windows have this system program called "CompatTelRunner.exe" that run silently in the background maybe once a month it's send data to M$ and using a lot of CPU power while collecting data, now with Al being pushed to windows who knows what it could be doing in the background without user knowledge
This stuff affects the user experience too. I’ve been able to daily drive Linux at work for a few weeks now. Restarting and booting into windows, after being used to Linux on the same hardware, makes windows feel like the slow, cobbled together OS that you can get for free.
I mean, we’re a Microsoft 365 company like many others, but even things like Teams and Outlook feel more responsive in Firefox in Linux than in the native apps on windows. Even video conferencing works great.
This difference isn’t exactly new to me, and I’ve used Unix or Linux sporadically over the past couple decades. However, using it as my main work OS has really highlighted the differences. Hell, even the multi-monitor support is better!
And this is with Mint Cinnamon installed, not some cutting edge or lean & fast distro.
Has what you said been proven and documented anywhere? All I can find is threads of people claiming things, but no actual (investigative) journalism that covers these parts.
Toggling on data collection without informing the user would mean billions of dollars worth of fines in Europe, so I doubt that happens regularly. Still, I don't mind being proven wrong if you got the proof to back it up
No it doesn't, at least not if the update isn't already a month overdue
But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.
I've done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it's a EU special feature (wouldn't be the first), but at least here they won't change back silently.
And this update outside active hours will have a good chance to "fix" your privacy settings again. Without you noticing. One basically needs a tool that confirms that your privacy settings are still active. And then wait how long it takes Microsoft to declare that tool as "malware".
I find it hilarious that Linux users STILL continue to hate on Windows Update when memes like this exist.
In my experience, Linux wants to update itself far more frequently than Windows (which is really generally no more than once a month these days), and it DOESN'T EVEN OFFER THE OPTION of automatically postponing it to a more convenient time. Yes, you can always say "not now", but then it'll just keep bugging you again until you say yes.
Ironically, at this point, updates on Linux are basically everything that Windows used to get made fun of in the past (for good reason!), but while the situation has actually improved on Windows, on Linux it's only become worse as distributions grow and updates become even more frequent.
Upgrade to Enterprise
(upgrading to enterprise will also remove ads in settings)
in gpo editor:
Set updates to Manual
set the telemetry level to "Security" in group policy (iirc can also be called "Compliance"). This only works on Enterprise.
opt out of Microsoft accounts. This will force account creation to skip right to local accounts as if MS accounts were never a thing. This only works on Enterprise/Pro.