caskance

I'm talking about MSDN, not their privacy policy.

Anyone who cares to look it up knows.

Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.

They do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.

Complain about the feature all you want, but pretending that it's not well documented or configurable is just silly.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...

It would still be a preposterous mischaracterization of what happened.

This is an insanely stupid title for an article that is essentially blogspam.

Because the figures are from a PR fluff piece about how much everyone is using the new features in windows 10.

It's not a zero sum game.

Good companies use information they collect to provide better services. Bad companies use it to rip people off. The problem of bad companies doing bad things is independent of companies having information about people.

I know exactly how much "crap" customers are willing to deal with. The difference is that unlike you, I don't take it as a given that they are wrong to do so. Is your computer crap because it's not a blue gene? Are you dealing with crap by driving a Honda instead of a Bentley? If people willingly choose conditions you think to be horrible, try to at least consider the possibility that you might be the one misjudging things and not them.

If that is the decision they face, that means customers did not want the thing that was sacrificed, and leaving it out is an improvement.

The danger most people worry about is when the customers are getting a better experience at the expense of individuals who don't have any choice in the matter, like in the prison scenario. But negative externalities are hardly specific to this situation.

And thanks to this technology, people can understand themselves better, if they choose to. It's truly bizzare that some people instead take away that the right way to "correct" this discrepancy is for companies to know less.

Some people will never admit they are wrong...

Historically, true. But we are rapidly approaching the point where there will be no privacy available to buy.

Reading the description of Memebox after it caught my eye while scrolling was by far the largest disappointment I've had today.

You've described a problem privacy only exacerbates. Complete enforcement is the best way to get bad laws adjusted or removed. Privacy makes that harder.

Then fix the real problem of the bad law. Deflection only makes things worse.

Since when do you need qualifications to blog about something?

That's overly pessimistic. In many heavily regulated industries, businesses run internal audits that are not officially mandated because they realize that changing things at your own pace for your own reasons is a lot easier and looks better to the public than being forced to change something in 3 months because you failed a required audit.

If you assigned engineers to disassemble your competitor's product to figure out how it worked, you would put yourself at grave risk of patent suits if you let them use that knowledge in any way in developing your own products. There's a reason clean room design is used. With something mechanical like an engine, that means reverse engineering is probably not helpful enough to be worth doing.

Marketing only manufactures desire if you interpret desire in the most narrow possible sense as desire for a specific product.

What marketing actually does is make desires concrete and suggest to the audience how that desire can be fulfilled. If you look at one of the most famous examples of successful marketing, diamond marketing created demand for a specific product, but it was only able to do so because the emotional needs the marketers tied their products to were already there and not being adequately met.

And some people are "pretty sure" the hyper advanced alien Xenu used hydrogen bombs to detonate all volcanoes on earth simultaneously and capture everyone's thetans. Unless you have any evidence, you're just going to have to resign yourself to the idea that most people won't believe you.

Privacy is a poor angle to pursue. It's old, and so we know, as you said, that people don't care.

They have a real chance if they ride the social justice and progressivism train, though. It's hot and unlike privacy, people care about it a lot. They've already set the precedent with the Eich controversy. They just need to double down and start promoting it better. Take initiative instead of being reactive. Not too hard when the organizations you're up against are gigantic multi-billion-dollar companies who can't afford to fire every conservative employee, not comply with government regulations their audience views negatively, or kowtow too hard to diversity for fear of angering the technolibertarians.

They will be reading memes and copypastas. Drink verification can will be to our children as 1984 was to us. Honestly, I envy them.

It's also full of Japanese imperialist apologism. As you might expect from such a source.

Contrary to your first comment, it sounds like you know very well which comments could affect your career.

If he were living in Vancouver, the Chinese government would likely have not been able to execute him. And not everyone gets capital punishment.

If you reasonably expect to lose your job for expressing the opinion, you're not free to express that opinion in any meaningful way.

They think they will be charged with corruption and they'd like to own homes and assets in other countries that won't be seized when that happens.

It depends on whether you don't take that idea seriously because you have thought seriously about whether women should stay in the kitchen and have concluded that they shouldn't, or whether it's just because that's what Common Joe thinks.

It's just as reasonable as defending someone who says "I don't like pumpkin pie", "I don't like racists" or "I don't like project managers". Nobody's obligated to like anyone or anything else, and you're not a bad person for not doing so.