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]