Microsoft’s new OS, Windows 10, has so far gained widespread popularity. While we reported that there had been 14 million downloads a day after its release, Windows Central claims that a Microsoft employee secretly told them that Windows 10 was running on a massive 67 million PCs as of three days ago. This number has not been verified, but all the same it doesn’t sound much considering Microsoft’s pledge to have Windows 10 running on one billion devices within the next three years.

Being Free

It can’t have hurt Microsoft to have received such glorifying feedback from the press. The last OS, most folks writing in the tech media seem to agree, is the bee’s knees.  But there has been some criticism, and that comes in the form of privacy settings and targeted advertising. This should have been expected; Windows 10 right now is free, for Windows 7 and 8 users anyway. Free never means free in the realm of consumer technology, it only means that you’ll be paying for something in another way. This often involves the use of your personal information, spending, surfing habits, etc, and in view of that the bombardment of advertising sometimes annoyingly appearing on your screen.

For instance, if you want to activate Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, you’ll have to allow Cortana to collect an awful lot of information about you.

Microsoft states, “To enable Cortana to provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions, Microsoft collects and uses various types of data, such as your device location, data from your calendar, the apps you use, data from your emails and text messages, who you call, your contacts and how often you interact with them on your device.”

Cortana will also collect data on how you use other Microsoft services, relating to what you buy, look at, listen to, and even when you wake up. In effect, Cortana will know everything about you, if you decide to enable it. This seems pretty scary, but of course that’s what Cortana is supposed to do. But how much information it collects about your friends, well, that’s a point of concern.

With all this information collected about you, and having your own original advertising ID, you have become a target for advertisers and developers. You can turn off various settings that collect this information, but first you will have to figure out how it’s done.

Transparency

The criticism concerning Windows 10 privacy has not really come as a huge surprise, but what has bothered some people is the lack of transparency; something Microsoft has stated would not happen. “Consumer privacy is at the heart of what we do every day at Microsoft.”

And reading this is testament to that transparency, “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.” The only problem is, as Alec Meer of gaming blog RockPaperShotgun, pointed out, it takes a lot of reading through a 12,000 word terms of use agreement to find this information.

EDRi (European digital rights organization) said of the rather arduous read, “Summing up these 45 pages, one can say that Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent “or as necessary”.

While in some cases, likely related to the law, your data might not be your own, there are ways to protect your data if you want to. You can opt out of many of the invasive privacy settings. Although that is some task in itself, and it is likely many people in love with Windows 10 won’t, or can’t opt-out. Let’s be frank, how many times do you ready privacy policies and service agreements? Meer writes, “There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency.’”

Reading the Future

In the award winning book Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and technological philosopher, and also a technologist at Microsoft, said, “’Free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.” Surely Cortana assisting you throughout your day is an example of the above statement. But as critical as Lanier is of this business model, he’s on the Microsoft payroll.

As far as conflict of interests go Lanier stated in an interview, “I don’t think any other major tech company would tolerate someone like me writing the way I do, so I think this is a great indication of positive qualities in Microsoft’s current culture.”

Lanier pretty much wrote an entire book based on how better we can share our information and even be remunerated for it, so it’s probably good, for us, the Windows consumer, that he chose to work with Microsoft.

The harvesting of data is the near future, as well as the present, and Microsoft is no different from Google, Apple and Facebook when it comes to collecting information about your activity online. Nonetheless, it’s still a bit of a quagmire, regarding how much we should give away and what can be taken from us. We are in the early days of immersive technology, let us hope that one day immersion will lead to empowerment, rather than being exploited, pushed, prodded, and spied on. Meanwhile, it’s probably time we all started reading, thoroughly, those terms of service agreements and privacy policies, as much as it might seem like a very laborious task.

If you want to know more about how to customize your privacy settings in Windows 10 head over to this Reddit post.

Photo credit: Mollybob via Flickr