This is AFTER debloating all the MS bs as much as I can.
The amount of MS telemetry is just mindboggling.
Submitted 1 year ago by praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/b1f3ebe2-fe2c-4c30-8c32-f4baf57272a0.webp
This is AFTER debloating all the MS bs as much as I can.
The amount of MS telemetry is just mindboggling.
As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.
To me, telemetry would be like a sofa company wanting to put some cameras in your home to see if you’re using the sofa the way they thought you would. It just feels… off.
“90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”.
Imo, a simple opt-in crash report gets the job done. Technically it is telemetry, but a crash report is more justified than a “where have you clicked” report.
telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold
There’s just no trust in companies to not sell my data. I cannot trust Microsoft nor Google nor any other company to not sell my data, having seen the shenanigans every single company is willing to pull off to get a cent more a year.
Oddly the “where you clicked” report does drive decisions for updates. We (as a developer) use that information to drive UI decisions and determine which flows are more important and should be more easily available
In general I agree, but users should be able to make that decision themselves. I do not understand why you can’t turn off telemetry, when it would be trivial to offer that option and so few users would bother to use it.
users should be able to make that decision themselves.
Agreed
I do not understand why you can’t turn off telemetry,
It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
I agree, it should be opt in. Where I disagree is with how strongly people react against it.
If you buy a car and it only comes with Bluetooth do you have a meltdown? Do you kick, scream, and cry that Big Car is going to steal your data? No that’s fucking ridiculous. But grown ass man children on Lemmy act that way when Microsoft wants to know how many gigs of ram they have.
As a programmer: “your data is boring. I am not interested in leveraging this for anything besides getting the service you are using to work as well as possible”
Also me as a programmer: “yo, you don’t need that data, stop asking for it. Ohh, your app is broken because it can’t access permissions? Yeet.”
It’s not about what the programmers want, it’s about the sales and marketing departments. They are the ones who use and abuse that data
As a programmer: “your data is boring. I am not interested in leveraging this for anything besides getting the service you are using to work as well as possible”
Also me as a programmer: “yo, you don’t need that data, stop asking for it. Ohh, your app is broken because it can’t access permissions? Yeet.”
It’s not about the programmers. It’s about the company and the ability to make money off of data they get from you. You should be the one who gets money for your data. Not Microsoft, not Google etc.
Is Microsoft making money off of this particular telemetry data? Maybe not. It should always be opt-in
Me, after spending an entire day making sure we don’t set any cookies until we get consent and actually need them, while fighting off managers who want to install a spyware X, Y and Z just to track the amount of sales, visiting random ass page that could’ve been entirely replaced by just an image, seeing half-page banner saying “we have already set cookies, serviceworker and all of the trackers because the internet does not work without them” be like: Fuck you, Artemiy, my site works fine even without javascript and no cookie header at all. It’s only yours that shits itself at any mention of privacy.
I don’t want you to know anything about me or my device. Simple as
How about shit breaking because everyone at some point is a bad programmer? Even Apple Music doesn’t work when I walk into the elevator until halfway through presumably because hitting play sets of a bunch of useless blocking network calls for music I have saved locally.
What those calls are, I can’t say for sure. Downloading artwork, license checks or telemetry. I’d venture to guess it’s the latter since music will play with placeholder artwork on a slow connection and license checks aren’t required if the subscription was recently validated (works offline for days).
But who really knows. I never bothered to inspect the traffic. The point is, if a company like Apple is creating such a crummy experience for a function so absurdly basic, you can imagine how easy and prevalent telemetry based user degradation is. Go browse the web with a tracker blocker and tell me it isn’t snappier.
PS: I’m also a programmer and collect error reports. So many developers will forego using connection pools, much less collect data with async api’s.
Do you consider Microsoft a “reputable company?”
Yes, but maybe “reputable” isn’t the right word. Realistically, it’s anyone who would potentially face billions in a class-action lawsuit and could actually afford to pay up without going bankrupt. It’s just not worth the risk to getting a few extra $million to pull in telemetry data to the already expansive list of marketing data they collect and monetize.
For example, I would doubt that Hearthstone (Blizzard, revenue $8.7B) sells their app telemetry data. But I could definitely believe that Hill Climb Racer (Fingersoft, revenue $30M) does, or at least integrates it with ad targeting products.
Microsoft has more to lose than almost any other tech company. They also have more process, legal enforcement, and bureaucracy than most other tech companies.
There’s no fear of a lone engineer moving fast and breaking things at Microsoft. If someone at Microsoft had an idea for how they’d have to pass it through 5 chains of command, 2 tech orgs, and Legal just to begin the process.
I mean, it does have a reputation…
So why not ask, “hey you want to share some telemetry to help us improve the product” then?
It’s what all reputable companies or projects, I am aware of, do.
A few things (and I enable it usually, for the record):
Policies get updated, companies are bought and sold, laws change, and most crucially of all, data gets leaked. It doesn’t matter how airtight your asshole is puckered up or how many isolated networks are involved. It gets leaked. Leave the decision up to users about it and in particular maybe let them have full control of their networks.
It doesn’t matter how airtight your asshole is puckered up or how many isolated networks are involved. It gets leaked.
That’s why our lawyers make us make sure that data is sufficiently anonymized before it’s even put on the wire.
Oh thank God, someone reasonable.
Before, I was lost.
That would be good, considered the user could actually have a choose to opt out the telemetry. Windows don’t ask you about gathering data for telemetry or “other” reasons.
Don’t get fooled by the insane amount of hits, when it’s not reachable it will try over and over
Yup. You need more like a logger to get the actual measure of the data.
Which could in turn make their pc run worse because it’ll constantly be retrying telemetry calls
Except this isn’t 1982 and that computer is running Windows 11, not Multix. The CPU probably has at least 8 cores and the NIC can do at least a gigabit. A network retry is not going to matter.
Depends, if you zoom in, most of the time it’s like 3 calls a second or something similar.
The future:
“Malwarebytes has flagged your entire operating system as potential malware”
Lol… :/
It has become really nasty for sure…
But I can’t really blame them. Who wouldn’t want to know? And who doesn’t do it? It’s just always MS who gets shit on for doing it. Everything and everyone tracks our every movement and click. If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started.
Don’t get me wrong, i effing abhor these things from the depths of my nerdy heart and do everything to block them all. But we just can’t avoid it anymore. We can just hope to get it all blocked or that it at least only sends anonymous usage-data and nothing else.
And who doesn’t do it?
OSS operating systems. The more proprietary software you run, the less and less you actually own your computer and the more it becomes a tool to advance the interests of megacorps.
Not all. Ubuntu does phone home too. But sure, most don’t. But OSS is not for mainstream-users. I am protected (and just pissed), i was speaking more on behalf of the clueless mass and in general.
But to play devil’s (angel’s?) advocate for a minute, Microsoft can’t fix vulnerabilities in Windows without telemetry data. There’s a practically infinite combination of hardware components Windows runs on, and that makes it impossible for Microsoft to find and fix vulnerabilities and bugs in house. Older versions of Windows were so insecure in-part because Microsoft made telemetry reports opt-in, and we all know how likely the average user is to do so.
Now that’s not to say that everything Microsoft collects is appropriate; I’m only saying there is a valid case for collecting some data from users.
we just can’t avoid it anymore
Speak for yourself. Besides, all-or-nothing privacy is a false dichotomy. Giving out less personal data is still better than giving out everything, and you don’t need 100% privacy to be unprofitable to advertisers.
You misread. It IS unavoidable nowadays or most of the surface-web is non-functional if you block anything that isn’t content. Besides the amount of work it takes to just not be tracked rises and rises.
Doesn’t mean I don’t do whatever i can do avoid it. To every techy it should be more than obvious that there is no binary approach. You can only do more or less to avoid more or less but never eliminate it.
So yeah, the less the better. And one might even partially reach a state where one is unprofitable to advertisers. Yet that can change tomorrow or on the next site or when you use some phone-app or or or…
That’s what i meant with “unavoidable”. You can’t avoid a persistent ever-evolving problem.
If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started
That's a good one! But to be fair, Apple calls home just as much. They just don't sell that data (yet).
As does Android. I’m not sure why we would give MS a by for this. They’re all as bad as each other and all deserve to be blocked as comprehensively as possible.
If you think they don’t use that data to try and sell apple products, I’ve got a bridge to sell.
They may not have an advertising network, yet, but they use your data for their interests. Currently, it serves their interests to pretend they are more private and secure, but they are not.
Totally. Wasn’t an apple-fanboy-comment. Apple even suck more. At least i COULD (and may!) change my pixel’s os to some privacy-focused one.
Desktop linux doesn’t have any of this. And one day we’ll get real linux on phones too (with full featured support).
Canonical Ubuntu does or at least did though. Caused a shitstorm years ago despite it being opt-in back then. I don't know how they do it nowadays.
KDE also has has opt-in usage tracking but I trust that project enough to believe it's really only for improving the software.
Nah, we will never have a GOOD Linux-phone. And if, it’s most likely NOT without tracking and whatnot. Why should any company put money into a thing they can’t control after sale? Sadly so, i might add.
It’s always MS who has people on the internet defending them when they do it, to the point that it looks like MS social media presence is being carefully managed, like Apple. I saw it happen on Reddit too, and it happened less and less the more they got called out. The same “$70 a year for Office 365 is so worth it” is a talking point when I was on Reddit. Apparently, people here say the same thing.
I’m not defending them. I just dislike the silly MS-hate train. As if they were the only ones doing it. If apple does it, it’s a feature. MS is evil. That’s as boring and old like IE-jokes that are still around. I have more Linux-machines than win-machines in my home lab.
And every major crap has its fanboys and marketing-workforce defending their shit.
Devil’s advocate: basically the only proper way to figure out how people are using your product and how you can tweak it to achieve its goal is by firing events and including relevant metadata such as how much time they spent on a screen or how far they scrolled. Telemetry is not necessarily “evil” by default.
The other side of that is that the telemetry data never gives you a “why” of something.
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about what to do, or they are confused by the options and can’t figure out which option they need.
This is why a QA team coupled with a large amount of beta testers is invaluable and necessary.
Telemetry, in the context of software development and UX design, is either a decision by the misinformed or just an excuse to save costs by axing the Windows QA department.
In reality it’s likely the data is being sold off. But in either case, that’s data Microsoft isn’t entitled to (from a moral/privacy perspective).
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about
… anything!
what am I gonna eat?
I should remember to feed the bicycle…
who stole my cat btw?
who am I to judge?
who am I?
what’s the meaning of life?
what’s the meaning of finding it?
what’s the meaning of figuring out what the meaning is of finding it???
I replied elsewhere but YES! Telemetry is notorious for causing devs to hyperfocus on shit features due to their high usage. Just because a user is clicking X over Y doesn’t mean Y sucks and X is better. Maybe Y is in their periphery, or camouflaged by the background artwork or worded badly. But hey, since X gets a lot of clicks, it must be good, right?
Telemetry, in the context of software development and UX design, is either a decision by the misinformed or just an excuse to save costs by axing the Windows QA department.
That’s very silly. That’s actually such a ridiculous opinion I’m pretty sure you’ve left out some assumption that would make it make sense.
The other side of that is that the telemetry data never gives you a “why” of something.
Focus groups and customer surveys work really well for knowing the “why” of something
I totally agree, but where I have a problem (and I imagine a lot of other users here) is that you can’t fully opt out. You can only set “minimal” tracking but not none.
You can if you have enterprise version.
Sure it’s scummy, but it’s definitely not hidden. When you open the settings page Data Collection is a top level option
Devil’s advocate: basically the only proper way to figure out how people are using your product
Focus groups and customer surveys work really well.
Well blocking these calls obviously inflates the numbers due to retries.
I can concur. MS do not know the concept of retry limitation.
You can even know when I’m working from home just to the number of blocked MS tracking calls in my pihole log 🤣
Those events are used by all of these services:
…microsoft.com/…/windows-11-endpoints-non-enterpr…
Literally everything, from Windows to Office to OneDrive to Cortana to diagnostics.
All of them(except for Cortana) I use, but barely.
I think it’s horrible and has no place at all in a operating system.
Join us… become Linux nerd, never look back. Hate that the one or two software you use that has no viable equivalent is either super janky or doesn’t work on wine even though tons of games outperform windows… with the windows build.
Or battle telemetry for several years until you get forced to subscribe to win 12.
Wait till you plug in your cell phone to charge they start calling home like crazy
“bUt ThAt DaTa iS gOiNg tO mAkE ThE pRoDuCt BeTtEr”
My fire stick does double that lol
Yeah, I recently did it for a lab and it was… interesting.
My Ubuntu VM wasn’t particularly great either but it was the one that my uni provided
I stopped using my Pihole because it kept eating SD cards. If that wasn’t an issue would love to be using it still.
I have other ways of disabling those telemetry reports.
O&O shutup 10 and adguard for desktop allow the user to turn off a lot of bullshit.
I recently switched my main desktop from windows to linux, and now my download speeds are much faster. I guess now I know why. 😬
Mind to tell which version and refion?
I use O&O ShutUp 10/11 for this , its super easy to use too
How much of that is Windows update processes?
That's literally Office356. If you use outlook or any part of the office suite, you will have tons of traffic to there. If you drop it, it will stop working.
Hehe yeah it’s fun to run pihole and see a windows machine gets turned on… Looots of attempted Spyware communication.
Does Pihole use RPZ’s? I don’t have any experience with it. Been using Infoblox with RPZ’s at home.
I’ve seen similar with Win 10. Just much less. Care to share what adlists you used? I’m also new to Pi-hole and always up for learning more.
P A I N…
Ciryamo@feddit.de 1 year ago
While telemetry is bad the problem here is probably that this windows service pings the server but doesn’t get a response because it got stuck in your pihole. So it tries to pings again and again and again and again…
BaardFigur@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same thing with ublock. It’s an annoying user-unfriendly practice. Google does the same thing
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Is that user unfriendly? In the desired path where the resource isn’t blocked the options are display an error or try again.
When a request goes to PiHole it just gets redirected to a bad address, so the application hasn’t got any idea why it isn’t working. In most cases a programmer just adds a retry with exponential back off and goes on with their work, because there’s no real cost to doing that for analytics or advertising code.
Knocturnal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The best solution would be to disable telemetry to the capacity you are capable or is possible without breaking something and block pings as backup to when it’s enabled again with updates and repeat.
lambda@programming.dev 1 year ago
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking…
dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Exponential backoff is baked in most libraries. So probably not.
Stumblinbear@pawb.social 1 year ago
Sure but if they’re trying to send new requests while the others are still retrying, then it will result in the same thing
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
Is there a service whit which you can automatially send fake answers to certain events?
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Teams no linger does that. It just goes to an error page if it fails to load twice