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If you have been refusing Microsoft's offer to upgrade your Windows 7 or 8* operating system to Windows 10 due to the oft-reported data and telemetry slurping it seems inclined to do, then it is time to be on your toes as to which updates you allow to be installed on your earlier version of the operating system.
El Reg reports that Microsoft are busy pushing similar functionality to those older operating systems by way of Windows Update. The updates in question can apparently be rolled back if required.
They are however very determined in their function if allowed to be installed, going so far as to ignore such venerable solutions as additions to the HOSTS file, which has historically been a way to knobble phone-home behaviour:
Now Microsoft is revamping the user-tracking tools in Windows 7 and 8 to harvest more data, via some new patches.
All the updates can be removed post-installation – but all ensure the OS reports data to Microsoft even when asked not to, bypassing the hosts file and (hence) third-party privacy tools. This data can include how long you use apps, and which features you use the most, snapshots of memory to investigate crashes, and so on.
The updates are KB3068708 ("Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry" and mandatory) KB3075249 ("Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7") and KB3080149 (also an "Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry", both optional).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hash14 on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:07AM
This is why it's so important to stand up for principle and not take the easy way out. What are people's remaining reasons for using Windows?
"I'm sorry, but it's just what I'm familiar with and I don't want to learn something new. Aw come on, it's not open source, but is that really such a big deal? Well it's the only thing I can use to get my job done. Sorry, but Gimp just isn't as good as Photoshop. And MS Word is the industry standard, so Libreoffice just won't cut it. The EULA isn't _that_ bad.... Yes, I know Microsoft _could_ do all these things, but they would _never_ abuse their position like that!"
So people just keep making excuses for themselves and it's just a death by a thousand paper cuts. But things like this show why you have to take a stand - because even back in the mid 2000s before I switched to Linux, I realized that I didn't have any control over my platform, nor did I know how many backdoors were already installed in my Windows machines. And even though it wasn't as big of a deal back then as it is now, I knew that the potential for harm was there and that I had to do something _BEFORE_ it's too late and shit like this starts happening and you have no preparedness to deal with it. So here we are today, and while we do our damnedest to convince people, they are either too lazy, or they refuse to take off their rose-tinted glasses and even consider that organizations they are so dependent on can be as evil as they are.
And this is also why we also have to fight systemd, and Mozilla, and kdbus, and Google, and the NSA, and the MAFIAA, and the TPP. And have you started noticing how hard it is lately to avoid GTK 3 and the playskool interfaces that they're imposing on users? Because if we just let people get away with things like this, they'll pull even harder before they finally push you over the line when there's nothing you can do about it. If you don't stand for things when they start going wrong, it'll just get that much harder later on down the road.