Here’s How Microsoft Can Fix Windows 10’s Privacy Issues (Premium)

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I’ve written a lot on this topic in the past, and about how Microsoft should simply market all of its products and services, including Windows 10, on their privacy merits. But as I noted in Microsoft Just Lost the Windows 10 Privacy FUD War (Premium) over two years ago, by continually focusing on the interface by which users can “configure” data collection in Windows 10, Microsoft has lost the battle. The issue isn’t “how” users can configure data collection. It’s that users can’t turn off data collection.
Doing so will not harm Windows 10: There are almost one billion people using this system and even if a sizable chunk of them went to the effort of turning off all data collection, it would still have a big enough audience from which to derive anonymous telemetry data. The system that maybe made sense when Windows 10 was new—after all, the software giant needed data to make sure it could update the system on the aggressive new Windows as a Service (WaaS) schedule—no longer applies.
With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?
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