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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

For better or worse, instrumenting Windows and analyzing the telemetry is what enables features like this to be developed scientifically rather than based on superstition, whimsy, or prejudice. It's the same principle found in Google Analytics, Tesla's latest models, and the Juno space probe. Good data makes informed decisions more likely. It has to come from somewheres.

TANSTAAFL.

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The problem with telemetry/analytics is not that they exist. The problem is, no one knows what they do, and everyone's afraid they may send something sensitive.

Give me a dialog somewhere, in which I would be able to see what's going to be sent (in somewhat human-readable format - i.e. not binary but a slightly commented source for that binary), a place to ask questions ("hey, there's a weird long hex string among the data - what does it encode?") and I'll be completely satisfied, and even praise them for doing things the smart and conscious-user-friendly way.

Well, as long as telemetry doesn't send something I consider sensitive, like an actual screenshots or keystrokes, of course.

Individual events in analytics data may be human-readable, but you can't call a list of 10,000 events human-readable.

Does 'grep' have an analog in Microsoft-world?

Windows has Select-String in Powershell and findstr in cmd.

Not a problem at all. Show me a sample entry (per event type) rather than a full list.

Say, some app has 10000 buttons and counts how many times each button was clicked. Something like "Clicks data: 3 clicks on button #1 (and 9999 more buttons [expand])" and I'm happy.

If there are 10000 different event types - uh, okay, I'll glance over whenever I see something sensitive (like screenshots or keystrokes) and then maybe I'll review it in my spare time. At least I know I can review the whole thing whenever I feel like so.

Upd: I mean, remember the myths about the telemetry. That send webcam pics, start odd network activity upon seeing files named after Hollywood movies and whatever. They'd be debunked in no time. ANd there are real concerns as well - insider previews had (or still has) keyloggers. I'd better know how sensitive the data this keylogger sends, because it could be the whole raw text data, or it could be... err... say, a list of frequencies a letter was recognized from hand drawing (which is a completely different story).

Sorry, but that's not a good enough reason to put my privacy at risk. I have no obligation to make Microsoft designers' jobs easier and no amount of telemetry will stop garbage[1] like the Windows 10 upgrade popup from being developed.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229040-microsofts-latest-...

I apologize for not being clear. Implying that someone ought to run Windows was not my intent. I was attempting, apparently unsuccessfully, to convey the idea that Windows 10 is unexceptional in so far as its design and use comprise tradeoffs.

Then be open about it and make them opt-in. Windows 7 RC was heavily instrumented and this is a large part of why Win7 was so good. With Win10 their approach was way more slimy.

All of these settings existed in previous versions of windows, all this does is gather them in one place.

The OS didn't need to gather mass amounts of data and ship them off to be stored and analyzed to figure out, 'hey, maybe we could gather them all in one place.' They probably just needed to listen to their own developers.

Given that all this data held by US companies on US soil is accessible to the US Government with no real hurdles and there is no real understanding of what they're collecting, ALL OS data collection should be fought all the time.

Alternatively, ask one of the thousands of developers that you employ, what they think could be improved. This isn't rocket science. It's just a dumb menu which collects settings into one place. You can send off an intern to ask around in the company what settings other developers would like to see included.

So, yes, something like this could have easily been a free lunch.

But why is "telemetry" also going to domains like ad.doubleclick.net or adnexus.net?

Source? Windows doesn't use telemetry for advertising.

Hell I'm in an industry many consider somewhat shady and practically the only telemetry we use for ads is "user installed the app" and "user paid us." Even that's mostly just to keep the ad partner honest. Everything else really is used to make the product better for you (and us) and it even really helps resolve customer support issues.

So how do they target their advertising based on your Windows 10 advertising ID like they said they would?

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