HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs

Re:HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs by II2II on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @12:52PM (#15799555)

Realistically speaking, how much control do people have regardless of the OS that they are using? We are talking about incredibly complex pieces of software here that relatively few people have the ability to monitor and very few people have the skills to correct.

Open source is not really a remedy here for the same reasons. We have seen how developers incorporate telemetry into projects, especially projects with mass appeal. Sometimes there is some pushback (e.g. Ubuntu). Other times it is mostly seen as a fact of life (e.g. Firefox).

The only time that you have a reasonable degree of protection is when you're far enough into the fringes that you're a part of a collective that is working proactively to protect a common interest.

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Re:HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs by pritambaral on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @12:08AM (#15804719)

1. Even if you cannot constantly vet every single piece of software, no matter how tiny, that is no excuse to simply let some software vendor do as they please, and to tolerate them as their abuses become more and more egregious.

2. Even in the case of Firefox, there was pushback. It may or may not have been sufficient, but there was. Ultimately, the disabling of that telemetry, whether by toggling a setting or by forking the browser, is still doable. The same cannot be said of some closed source software, particularly of the OS-level spyware that Microsoft has been peddling.

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