High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name contains “user”

Re:High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name c... by ralish on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @12:24PM (#11714901)

It appears to be a support library for dfp.exe, which is the "Disk Footprint Tool". I never knew it existed until now, but it seems to be a potentially quite handy utility with a purpose similar to tools like WinDirStat (but CLI only?).

So to answer your question, no, it's not part of the telemetry infrastructure. And I'll add that calling that infrastructure "spyware" is a simplistic analysis of what's a complex issue. I say that as someone who goes to great pains to turn off as much telemetry as I can across almost all applications I use.

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Re:High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name c... by mixedCase on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:21PM (#11715984)

I have a personal line that works for me to determine wether something is spyware or not:

Do I have a universal toggle to shut off all "telemetry" data? If not, then it's spyware.

If it spies on me making it difficult or impossible for me to disable the spying, then what really makes it any different from traditional malicious spyware other than the intention? (if there's any difference to begin with)

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