complaining about google is nothing like the whims of fashion. google is a legitimate threat to privacy and liberty, and that should be laid bare repeatedly so we don't get complacent and forget.

facebook as well, to a slightly lesser extent. microsoft is trying to compete on that front (poorly) and should also be called out.

it's not an either-or proposition, but an all-of-the-above one.

You forgot to say why Google would be a bigger threat than Microsoft, which is annoying given the person you are responding to clearly listed the reasons why Microsoft is actually collecting more informations than Google.

Also, Microsoft has a much worse historical record than Google regarding protecting their users. For instance, at a time when Microsoft was happyly complying to every rules required to be allowed to do business in China, Google decided to not comply and close its offices in that country, all in the name of privacy.

So yes, bashing Google in the comment section of an article about Microsoft Edge misbehavior certainly sounds like the whims of fashion, if not of organised business propaganda.

edit: beating Android keyboard to oblivion

> You forgot to say why Google would be a bigger threat than Microsoft

Microsoft wants you to use their spreadsheet software.

Google is a significant gatekeeper to information which influences what we know and the opinions we form. And that information is increasingly first party, e.g. YouTube, the Play Store.

No. Microsoft wants to control corporate and government identity, client compute and server compute.

Google is mostly about the consumer.

Between Linked-In and O365, they have the ability to target their B2B marketing or facilitate surveillance more than any other organization on the planet. Google knows all sorts of things about me, but Microsoft knows who the government official handling a critical matter is, knows who their secretary is, and knows who the lobbyists, applications or service providers.

Google may be evil, but Microsoft isn't some white knight. They are hard competitors well placed to unseat traditional enterprise players.

It seems you can’t say anything on the internet without someone interpreting it with rigid binary thinking. Fine then. Microsoft isn’t great either. Google does some good things. News at eleven.

> Microsoft wants you to use their spreadsheet software.

... and windows OS, visual studio, sql server, azure, linkedin, github, bing, skype, etc which all collects data on you. Also, I love that you dismissed their office suite as just "spreadsheet software". It's only the world's ubiquitous office suite used everywhere in the world.

The idea behind that comment seems to have been: "MS has a known motive: they want to sell you software and make money. This is a business model I understand, and can deal with being on the other end of." The same argument is used in iOS vs Android debates: why isn't it the same shit, different smell? Because Apple sells you hardware, and Google sells You.

The glib terseness of the comment is a metaphor for the relative harmlessness of the business model. Not indicative of the actual product selection or annual revenue.

I think, anyway...?

Pretty much, yes.

It’s not so much that Microsoft or Apple’s business model is harmless—I certainly wouldn’t describe them that way—but their business models and their forms of influence are comprehended by most people.

> MS has a known motive: they want to sell you software and make money.

And the idea behind my comment was : They also want to sell you. Bing, linkedin, github, etc aren't selling you software. Also, windows OS has ads now.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window...

> Because Apple sells you hardware, and Google sells You.

Apple also sells you. They sell you to music, movie, etc industry in order for the industry to support apple's platform.

> The glib terseness of the comment is a metaphor for the relative harmlessness of the business model.

Which I showed was wrong.

It's insane the amount of microsoft and apple support on a tech platform. I guess all the money that microsoft/gates spent on PR truly worked.

> I think, anyway...?

I don't think you thought things through too well... Your argument was basically google sells chromebook/hardware so everything else they do is fine.

> Apple also sells you.

By that logic, a shopping mall “sells you” to retail stores. A cinema “sells you” to movie studios. Etc.

Only those shopping malls and cinema chains that get you to sign up for something and get your info and have tracking capability. What do you think AMC Stubs A-List program is about?

Apple is worse than AMC or shopping malls since they have much more identifiable data on you ( even more than google in many respects ) and use that to sell you. Not just your data but recommendations/etc.

Apple sells you in the same way google/facebook/microsoft/etc sells you. Collectively and individually.

In the past shopping malls and cinemas used to sell you collectively to retail stores and movie studios. Now many of them can sell you individually to retail stores and movie studios. Something really has gone wrong when there is support for Apple on a tech forum. Usually apple just preys upon non-tech people who like overpriced shiny things. It's strange the amount of "support" apple and microsoft gets nowadays.

Oh, I didn't realise you're just spinning conspiracy theories. If any of that were true, we'd know about it. There would be leaks from employees of the companies who are receiving this data from Apple.

Wow, I was totally not being hyperbolic and I really did think Microsoft only made spreadsheets.

Thanks for that.

> Also, Microsoft has a much worse historical record than Google regarding protecting their users.

Google literally forces you into ad transactions. Their entire business model is based around coercing users into giving up their attention to businesses without your consent. This includes critical services such as youtube premium which is $15(!) to just remove the fucking ads. They don’t even offer this for their other services. So no, I can trust google as far as I can throw them.

Microsoft will make tons of money without spying on users and setting up "anonymous" profiles of peoples personal tastes, behavior, buying patterns, and other personal information. Google will make significantly less money if they don't spy on users. Its not about Google, its the domain itself. Advertising is a scummy business. Google brags about their advertising targeting capabilities, which simply cannot exist without spying on users. It beats me why anyone would think an advertising company would be pro-privacy. Their goal is to setup a toll booth on the internet by inserting themselves between the user and the content they want to actually get to. I'm waiting for Google to buy all the display companies and show a perma ad-box on the monitor itself. (haha.. I hope I didn't give t hem any ideas.. maybe I shouldn't even be making the joke.. :P )

>Microsoft will make tons of money without spying on users,

and they will make even more money by spying on users and selling that data. EvilCorp is not known for leaving money on the table. Google chooses to give away their products to lure people into using them. M$ has the luxury of having the users pay money for their products while also giving up the same data.

Actually there's been evidence that repeatedly hearing certain types of news makes people less sensitive to them. In other words, if people constantly hear about GOOG or MSFT being privacy concerns in the 21st century, those people will think of it as the new norm. Sad, but true.

that's definitely a valid concern, but i'm not sure we've reached that point. the constant pressure is certainly needed to get these companies to innovate away from products based on invasiveness and surveillance, or to have new companies pop up to out-compete them.

Maybe people want to get their sense of priorities first.

One of my guesses is security. The story behind the discovery of MS08-067 reads like a strong argument in favour of some telemetry. The TLDR is that someone at Microsoft noticed a strange crash in some telemetry bucket, and it turned out to be a wormable zero-day. There's a write up at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/johnla/the-in..., for those interested, and even though that story is twelve years old by now the general premise still stands.

Yep. Every year the Windows security team catches 0days that are under development from the crash logs telemetry and is able to patch them before they're mass exploited.

Edge is nothing compared to defender ATP telemetry. For those with it, they also know every site you go to (outside of edge),every program you open,every file you interact with and much more.

They do a lot with it froma security perspective but I reckon they have plenty other uses for it as well.

It's nice to hear this mentioned. Just Windows by itself is a privacy nightmare. It's always amazed me that it isn't talked about alongside other companies and software with privacy issues.

and they own linkedin and github...

Microsoft doesn't have eyeballs like Google and Facebook do. Even if they have the data, they aren't a central point of the internet (search) or the prevailing social network (Facebook). The monetization to serve ads isn't there.

It's very likely that they sell that data to the US intelligence community.

One good example is Skype which they bought two years after rumors surfaced [1] that the NSA offered billions for solutions that can wiretap Skype calls. After they've bought it, they removed end to end encryption as well as the peer to peer system, sending all content over Microsoft servers.

It's a bit better if it's "only" shared with the US intelligence community instead of anyone who names a price for it, but obviously still not really good for privacy.

[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions...

No major video conferencing setup has peer to peer video because that is an ‘innovation’ patented by VirnetX.

I'm pretty sure Whatsapp/Facetime is P2P for video calling. But I'm not sure about a video conferencing solution i.e. a multi-party/group call. I have a service that sniffs packets going in/out of my home network which maps the remote IP to a registered ASN and the Lat/Lon coordinates. All of my Whatsapp sessions have been tagged with the name of the ISP at the other end and the right position coordinates. Not Facebook's/Apple's.

Follow-up : Was on a group call today on WhatsApp. All packets were being routed through Facebook. So, group calls are indeed not E2E.

What? So my self-hosted P2P WebRTC is in violation of a patent? And the companies I set these services up for too? Are all the others (zoom, go-to, uberconf, jitsi, etc) just not doing P2P?

IIRC P2P doesn't scale beyond a few participants because all the streams are going to all participants. Centralized can reduce bandwidth and number of data exchanges

Maybe, I've had 10 in a room w/o much issue - but my team is all on good pipes. It's not a webinar.

But scale is a different (easier?) problem/risk than patent troll.

Centralize on the peer who hosted/called the meeting?

I think Skype P2P relied on super nodes which had the best bandwidth and processing

Prior art on peer to peer video conferencing from 1992: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

I doubt Virnetx’s patent is particularly strong.

> Apple responded by petitioning the PTO to invalidate these four patents. Through these various proceedings (and others initiated by additional interested parties), the PTO has invalidated every patent claim VirnetX has asserted against Apple, finding all either anticipated or obvious.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-832/126835/2019...

The four patents in question:

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US6502135B1/en

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US7490151B2/en

Sadly though, that decision by the PTO was partially reversed by the courts:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-...

Their patent is BS. It's obvious, and probably has prior art too.

Tell that to Apple who just had to pay them about $500 million in a final judgement.

Aren’t software patents unenforceable in Europe?

Microsoft operates Bing and Bing Ads. Nowadays they are also serving ads in Windows 10 itself.

Market share is irrelevant, the incentive is there.

I haven't seen any ads in Windows 10. Is that a special version?

They exist in the free version of Windows 10 (without a serial key). They're embedded in all sorts of places, including Solitaire.

Not only in the free version.

I have a licensed Windows 10 at home installed from scratch, ISO downloaded from Microsoft. Before configuring it, yes, it had ads in it.

You have never seen the messages on the lockscreen or the preinstalled windows store apps in the start menu?

I've never seen ads on the lockscreen- and pre-installed crapware has been with us forever. I'm on home edition- it came with the laptop (toshiba satellite, for completeness)

To be clear if your lockscreen is the changing pictures there are messages on those that are "ads" in the sense that they can take you to promoted sites. Same with the built in Windows search. If web search is not disabled anything not found on your computer launches a bing search which like google search as results as ads.

Oh the text that when I click it searches for something like "grand teton national park wyoming".

I guess that's technically an ad, but my goodness it that the least intrusive ad I've ever seen. Wish all ads were like that.

It is nothing like the pop ups and pop unders of yore but still, you pay a license to use the operating system. There should be zero ads.

Agreed. I guess I just never clicked anything so didn't notice.

The crapware installation was never built into the OS before. That makes a difference.

MS does run at the heart of most businesses though. No ads, but potential for other sources.

> Microsoft doesn't have eyeballs like Google and Facebook do

[Citation needed]