Re:Rumors of Cmd’s death have been greatly exaggerated
by ygra on Thursday January 05, 2017 @02:05AM
(#13325316)
There has been an opt-in for »Share anonymous usage details with Microsoft to make stuff better« since ages in Windows and other Microsoft products. So if yo enabled that, I presume they will log telemetry about what features of Windows are used, how often, together with which other features, etc. I wouldn't expect that to extend to non-Windows programs since there's little they can learn from it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Rumors of Cmd’s death have been greatly exaggerated
by greggyb on Thursday January 05, 2017 @10:42AM
(#13327963)
Executable name would probably be valuable. They could easily maintain a hand-curated list of Office-alikes, for instance (the list would be small enough to manage), to track what competitive products are being used and any trend in those.
This would provide competitive information and could help point the way to features that are important to users, based on the differentiation between the competitive product and Office.
I have no idea if they do this or not, but it's something that anonymous data could be used for outside of just Windows features and programs.
Yes, you could circumvent this sort of thing, but this is a case of the 99.99% of people who wouldn't care or know how to vs the .001% who do. For the use case outlined above, that's irrelevant.