this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
1073 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59972 readers
2440 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They 100% are spying and not even hiding it. That isnt what makes a system laggy though as its just a background process snitching on you once and hour or so.
Walk me through that thinking. You believe constantly capturing screen grabs/key presses/file content/etc, processing it, packaging it, and sending to the home servers would have no impact on system resources?
its not grabbing screen grabs and and key presses as you do them, its logging things that you interact with in the background and then packaging that up as a telemetry package to asynchronously send off to a server.
No it doesnt have no impact on resources but it negligable compared to what the previous poster mentioned about making everything dependent on network services and introducing latency that way.
You should read up on Recall. It is openly designed to use screen grabs. And my suspicion is they’re already collecting the data for it.
Yes I am aware of recall, and that it is only available on specific AI focused PCs (copilot+). Dont get me wrong its a been a complete clusterfuck in they way they have done it, but if windows was using regular windows installs to gather screenshots and then phone them home it would be both incredibly stupid on Microsoft's part (for a huge amount of companies that would be a deal breaker) and be very discoverable.
No, you’re thinking of the piece that will offload the AI processing to the local machine. They’re likely still capturing everything, and processing at least some of it back at their data centers.
It is discoverable. That’s what we’re doing here. Positing that may be the cause of the significantly increased overhead in Windows 11. If it were simply telemetry, as you’re suggesting, we would’ve seen the same performance hit in Windows 8 & 10. That we’re seeing such a decline from 10 to 11 on the exact same hardware suggests this goes way beyond that.
Saying "new windows is slow as hell" is not evidence that they are capturing and sending off screenshots (which is far more intrusive than even the first fucked up proposal for recall before they walked it back significantly). ME and Vista were both slow as shit too but they weren't doing this.
Again windows is spying on you, just not in that particular way which would be very easy for security researchers to discover and would be catastrophic for businesses trust in Microsoft if it was discovered.
You need to pick a lane. You gonna play dumb, or present yourself as knowledgeable?
Because anyone knowledgeable enough to be clued in on just how extensively Windows is now spying would also understand that Microsoft lying to all of their customers, and going way over the line with it to the point of illegality, is completely and totally believable and absolutely in line with Microsoft’s pattern of behavior.
Since when has ‘security researchers will eventually catch you’ ever prevented these big tech companies from breaking the law before?
No I don't need to "pick a lane", just because Microsoft are awful does not mean any claim about them doing a bad thing is sensible no matter how far fetched. Microsoft do care about how windows is perceived by businesses (as opposed to you and I think about them, which they do not care about), and the risk of doing what you are alleging is very high for them (easy to detect) and would have severe negative consequences for them (oops, cant use windows in healthcare as its leaking PII). To add to this the only evidence you are presenting for it is "windows is slow".
Yeah, I’m familiar with the arguments. I’ve had this argument with bad actors time & time again every time Microsoft starts rolling out something even worse. It’s always some version of, ‘Microsoft is bad, but they would never do that!’
And then it comes out a year later that they would, in fact, do that.
Do they have you assigned to play devil’s advocate just on Lemmy, or are you tasked with this on the Reddit technology sub, too?
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what I am saying. I'm not saying they "wouldn't do this, they're not that bad" I'm saying "they wouldn't do this as it would get them little, they'd get caught and it would have bad blowback for them".
They're also not stealing peoples bank accounts or blackmailing people with personal information. Again, just because they are shitbags does not mean every bad thing you can come up with no evidence is true.
‘They’re not doing this thing they already announced they would be doing a couple months back!’
Ok I'm done here if you're just going to start making shit up. No they did not announce that they would record peoples screenshots without their permission and start uploading them to their servers.
They didn’t announce Recall? They haven’t been caught misusing customer data before? They haven’t been increasing their spying efforts since Windows 8?
Y’all need a new playbook. This might have worked to sell people on Windows changes in the past, but you’ve overused this strategy to the point that it’s lost all plausibility.