“Earlier this month Microsoft finally went on record admitting that automatic spying within Windows 10 cannot be stopped,” Gordon Kelly reports for Forbes. “This sparked a lot of outrage and with ‘Threshold 2’ it appeared Microsoft had done a sharp U-turn because the background service at the heart tracking (the ‘Diagnostics Tracking Service’ aka ‘DiagTrack’) appeared to have been removed. Critics celebrated and it was another well deserved pat on the back for Microsoft.”
“Except it turns out Microsoft had just been very sneaky,” Kelly reports. “What Tweakhound discovered and was subsequently confirmed by BetaNews, is Microsoft simply renamed DiagTrack. It is now called the ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service’ – which is both a) deliberately vague, and b) misleading (don’t ‘Connected User Experiences’ sound great).”
“Even sneakier is, in being renamed, Microsoft also reset users preferences,” Kelly reports. “Those who dug deep into the Windows 10 registry to disable DiagTrack will find it has been re-enabled now it is called the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service. Yes, tracking is back and without any warning and your preferences were irrelevant.”
More info in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Those who use inferior wares deserve their fate.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
All companies use BS to promote their advantage. This is why I don’t root for any of them, and root against many of them. It’s basically just the quality of the BS.
Spying, unfinnished products, … The computer industry is dying pretty fast now. probably something wrong with linux too.
Sent from my iPhone
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OS X and Linux are safe. It’s just M$ wanting to control/spy on the user
Install Little Snitch and see how safe OS X is. You can’t even open Safari without the app “phoning home.” Since Snow Leopard was replaced, the amount of “phoning home” has grown exponentially.
Little Snitch just shows the myriad daemons and system processes that continually run in the background. OS X IS an operating system, after all. Amd Safari talks to a lot of outside entities, being a web browser and all. Wouldn’t work if it didn’t. Doesn’t mean you’re being ‘spied’ on.
Microsoft was so very close with this one. They only needed to change “Experiences” to “Narratives” and it would have been perfect.
> Except it turns out Microsoft had just been very sneaky…
“Sneaky”? Not “very.” Microsoft just renamed it and hoped no one would notice. Sort of like thinking people would forget Windows 8 more quickly if they skipped “nine.” 🙂
I am not defending Microsoft here, but “Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service” sounds more accurate than “DiagTrack.” This is not being misleading, and is effectively the same kind of thing they have done in the past. If you understand the language, you will understand better what the service is. What they have done is renamed a service to better explain what it does. It’s not duck speak.
Resetting user preferences, hmmm… If it’s deep in the registry and not a UI selectable item, how are they to know you “meant” it, and it otherwise wasn’t data corruption?
I simply want to call this what it is. Not trying to make this some diabolical conniving mess. Although that is what it is turning into. It should be made very easy to turn off. It’s IE all over again.
The end user should always be aware of what their computer transmits and should be able to turn it off.
I never agree to any feedback service, even on Apple products.
Does anyone know if the Mac version of OneNote and OneDrive do the same type of spying on the users data?
Install LittleSnitch and it will tell you if they do.
You really might want to consider spelling your handle correctly. Using — and misspelling — a phrase like “cognitive dissonance” practically screams “I want people to think I’m smarter than I truly am.”