Obviously most people are fine with telemetry.
Apple charges WAY more for its OS than Microsoft does for Windows 10 Home Edition. Don’t want adds? Buy the Pro version.
This “apples are better than oranges” indignation about Windows 10 is getting old. Don’t like it? Fine. Let other people enjoy things they like.
Personally this is probably the process by which I become a luddite. You can pry my free OS from my cold dead hands.
For now, the server market is enough to keep general purpose computing going. In twenty years, who knows?
My friends and family who are not power users don't know enough to even understand what malware is or means. They likely never will, just as they don't understand all of the ingredients in their food.
This doesn't make it OK.
We're moving from sofware you run without any interference to subscription and surveillance models, and that's not because users want that, that's not "what they like", they don't have an easy way to get what they do like while also being treated ethically.
The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme is mostly just an excuse for a flame war.
I guess you could say companies are obviously afraid of offering the choice, of offering the same product with and without telemetry, clearly labeled.
> The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme is mostly just an excuse for a flame war.
Why are you putting such mocking words into my mouth? I'm not saying "Windows telemetry bad", I'm saying what I'm saying.
I would think differently if I saw the same amount of criticism towards other products which commit similar if not worse “offenses”. MacOS does a comparable amount of telemetry. Ubuntu does telemetry (albeit presumably less).
If telemetry as done by OS providers is an offense, then half the tech industry is built on top of even more severe privacy offenses. Can you imagine any serious digital product NOT doing what is essentially telemetry? Imagine online ad companies NOT spying on you? I mean, if it offends you, then sure, voice your discontents. But if a collective in aggregate constantly criticizes minor offenses by one player but lets other players off the leash for way more, it’s not about privacy, sorry.
Also, I don’t agree that people are ignorant. Most of media coverage about Windows 10 revolved around its telemetry. It’s asked when you install it. It’s in the settings. I mean, if you don’t care about it after that then you don’t care.
Personally, I think telemetry is OK. So I’m not bothered, as long as it’s not outright spying. I’m also OK with paying more for Windows 10 Pro to not have the stupid ads.
My OS does not phone home.
It contacts package mirrors when I ask it to and only when I ask it to.
It contacts NTP servers because I specifically enabled that.
That's it. By contrast Windows is a black box of nonsense.
The copy I have running in a VM has the marketing name "Cortana" process running even though I specifically chose "no" at install.
I enabled a data limit the other day and played some games. The game used 30MB and the combined OS used >60MB doing who knows what despite the fact it tells me updates are not downloaded on metered connections.
Sorry, no, there is no excuse for this. If it's not opt in, it's malware. If it's opt in defaulted to yes and with no clear benefit to the user, it's malware.