This is why I switched to Firefox years ago and have never looked back. I already have enough low-grade anxiety from trackers and whatnot sucking my data, I can't deal with an entire browser that exists solely to gather data.

The fact that so many of us in the development community, who are particularly sensitive to privacy concerns, unashamedly use Chrome continues to baffle me. I had one guy on Reddit tell me he feels really bad about knowing how little privacy he has using Chrome, but that he continues to use it because the font kerning on Chrome is slightly better.

If you read a lot on websites font kerning can be a big issue.

I reckon Microsoft can be even worse considering how much data they gather about you through telemetry built in Windows. Imagine if you're web dev using windows and edge along with vscode. Oof.

Microsoft is way less interested in selling your data to third parties than Google - ads are not the majority of their income

Have you seen the amount of telemetry built in Android/Chrome or any Google product?

Windows is only now trying to level the playing field to that which Google already assumes.

> along with vscode

For those who don't know about it, VSCodium is a community-delivered build of Visual Studio Code with telemetry removed.

https://vscodium.com/

Very helpful links, thanks.

I work on Windows (speaking informally here, these are my own opinions and not those of my employer, etc.)

We care a lot about GDPR and privacy, and there's been a big top-down push to reduce the amount of telemetry collected, including giving good justifications for anything we want to keep collecting. We have to make sure all the data is kept in GDPR-compliant systems that can handle the deletion and security policies, and we regularly take training to tell us what is and isn't compliant use of customer data. My team uses it mostly for seeing the success rate of our feature across different hardware, firmware and OS versions, which helps us identify issues and poke certain partners to improve ecosystem reliability. I can't speak for the Edge/Bing/Whatever teams, but I'd hope they take it as seriously as us.

I definitely wish users had more control over data collection without resorting to group policy, and I wish users had more visibility and control over more of the OS in general, but I feel we've learned the wrong lessons from Apple so everything must be unconfigurable and only give vague feedback like, "Something is happening..." (but I digress). In terms of caring about privacy I'd still give Apple the crown, but I don't think it'd be unfair to give Microsoft second place.

I think the issue that people still have with Microsoft's telemetry approach, is that I'm generally happy to forward error messages or logs or whatever, but I don't like the agency to not do that taken away from me. I get that default-enabled and non-disableable telemetry provides better statistics, but that can't be worth the cost of what Microsoft did, which was take all of the goodwill they'd recently built up and light it on fire.

As you aren't management, I get that you can't really do much to impact that. But I think the idea that "seeing the success rate of our feature" can't possibly be worth the risks and harm to goodwill and trust that Microsoft's telemetry approach took.

Side note "Something happened" as an error message when trying to upgrade Windows 10 is my favorite go-to example of bad error messages. It didn't even give you the paradoxical 0x80000000 error code that you had to use a search engine to figure out what meant. It was just a notice that something went wrong.

I appreciate telemetry. Just give me my taskbar and start menu junplists back.

Microsoft may not be any better, but at least they don’t pretend that they are after anything but profit. Google still tries on occasion to put a socially responsible, caring, small indie front, despite the fact that everyone should know better by now.

— I am making no judgment calls on the validity of profit motive, nor am I saying that Google is any more evil for having one. It is the blatant doublespeak about what Google is and does that grates my nerves.