The administrator of AE News (an online news portal for Czech and Slovak expatriates) writes a very revealing article regarding the Windows 10 collection of user data. Here is the original Czech article. Here is a Bing translation to English. Here is a English condensed version translated by a blogger. And finally a PDF of the original Czech article.
In the post the AE News administrator states:
With the advent of Windows 10, I decided to undergo several tests. The collected knowledge for someone may be alarming. The Windows operating system 10 is essentially the end terminal, more than the operating system, because many of the processes and functions of this system is directly or indirectly dependent on remote servers and databases to Microsoft.
All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to:
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
AE News also references an arstechnica.co.uk article which states it might be impossible to stop this communication:
And finally, some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy."
arstechnica.co.uk also "asked Microsoft if there is any way to disable this additional communication or information about what its purpose is". Microsoft did not reply as to a way to disable this chatter but did respond to the 'additional communication' stating Microsoft is now 'delivering Windows 10 as a service'.
Although the original source for this story is skeptical, Smart nerds on soylentnews can easily fire up Wireshark and reveal the communication for themselves. It appears that MS has fully embraced the cloud where your OS is now a terminal. And regarding privacy? Well, according to arstechnica.co.uk: Windows 10 privacy policy is the new normal
(Score: 2, Insightful) by SDRefugee on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:27PM
That Windows 10 also collects video from any connected webcam and audio from any connected microphone and ships it off to Microsoft.. If that isn't the DEFINITION of spyware, I don't know what IS.. I'm soooo glad I moved all of my home systems over to Linux back around 2011. I'm sort of the neighborhood "tech support", and I've already had several neighbors ask me what I think of Windows 10 and I tell them to stay with Windows 8.1 or 7, whichever you have, unless you want *your* business to become MS's "business"... I hope the corporations slap MS silly over this crap, but I suspect it won't happen as I'm betting the "enterprise" version of Windows 10 doesn't have this crap in it, only the home and pro, which you and I, the unwashed multitudes CANNOT get.... I'll go on record here with this... FUCK YOU MICROSOFT...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..