In absolute “Oh duh” news, it turns out that there is a price to the FREE Windoze numbuh 10 operating system.
Jeeeminny, you would have to be squeezing your mind shut tight to not have noticed Microsoft in the giant orgy bed with all the governmental and NGO data gathering and sharing conglomerates of the western world.
NGO = Non-Government-Organizations, a massively overgrown monster of unelected, uncontrollable bureaucracy intruding, controlling and sucking the life out of the world.
Edward Snowden pulled massive amounts of it all together, courageously and selflessly sacrificed a comfortable $200,000-per-year life to PROVE the GOs and NGOs are capturing, storing and sharing everything they can about every one of us.
Top level national and international politicians are *SHOCKED* to find that “everyone” includes them. Silly children. J Edgar Hoover didn’t own FBI’s top seat forever because he was Mr. Wonderful. He owned everyone’s closet skeletons. He was simultaneously the left hand of God and the right hand of Satan.
George Bush The First spent years as CIA’s head skeleton collector before his family became world rulers.
Hitlary got caught with FBI and IRS files in her White House office from whence she and Slick Willy targeted enemies and destroyed lives.
Who could not know this?
Did anyone think the data collected and data collection went away just cuz the news reports stopped talking about them?
NSA builds a new humongous data collection center in Utah that is only a small part of their spying-on-everybody apparatus. It is in my head permanently. They are everywhere. Apparently, if it isn’t on the evening news regularly, it no longer exists for Joe and Jane Average.
The Cloud – What exactly do you think that does? How handy… for the mega data octopus. I make them scratch, claw and dig it out of my computer*. You-all throw it at them like candy from a parade float.
*Well, except for what I know they have from social media, e-mail and my websites.
So they have nearly everything. But that word “nearly” bugs them to no end.
Now the masses infect their computers with FREE WINDOZE 10 in droves.
Drink the fluoride.
Eat your GMOs.
Vote R this year, D the next.
Meekly endure TSA strip searches.
Inject your Big Pharma.
…and for goodness sakes, install our eyes and ears in the computers you take with you everywhere and tell your deepest secrets to.
On to the news…
‘Incredibly intrusive’:
Windows 10 spies on you by default

Technology journalists and bloggers are singing Windows 10’s praises, often using the words such as “amazing,”“glorious” and “fantastic.” The operating system has been described as faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any previous version of Windows. According to Wired magazine, more than 14 million people have downloaded their upgrade since the system was released on Wednesday.
While the upgrade is currently free of charge to owners of licensed copies of Windows 8 and Windows 7, it does come at a price. Several tech bloggers have warned that the privacy settings in the operating system are invasive by default, and that changing them involves over a dozen different screens and an external website.
According to Zach Epstein of BGR News, all of Windows 10’s features that could be considered invasions of privacy are enabled by default. Signing in with your Microsoft email account means Windows is reading your emails, contacts and calendar data. The new Edge browser serves you personalized ads. Solitaire now comes with ads. Using Cortana – the voice-driven assistant that represents Redmond’s answer to Apple’s Siri – reportedly “plays fast and loose with your data.”
“I am pretty surprised by the far-reaching data collection that Microsoft seems to want,” web developer Jonathan Porta wrote on his blog. “I am even more surprised by the fact that the settings all default to incredibly intrusive. I am certain that most individuals will just accept the defaults and have no idea how much information they are giving away.”
As examples, Porta cited Microsoft having access to contacts, calendar details, and “other associated input data” such as “typing and inking” by default. The operating system also wants access to user locations and location history, both of which could be provided not just to Microsoft, but to its “trusted partners.”
“Who are the trusted partners? By whom are they trusted? I am certainly not the one doing any trusting right now,” Porta wrote, describing the default privacy options as “vague and bordering on scary.”
Alec Meer of the ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ blog pointed out this passage in Microsoft’s 12,000-word, 45-page terms of use agreement:
“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.”
While most people are used to ads as the price of accessing free content, writes Meer, Microsoft is not making it clear enough that they are “gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits,” not just browser data.
Opting out of all these default settings requires navigating 13 different screens and a separate website, the bloggers have found.
Meer was underwhelmed with Microsoft executives’ claims of transparency and easily understandable terms of use. “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,’” he wrote.
Tracking and harvesting user data has been a business model for many tech giants. Privacy advocates have raised concerns over Google’s combing of emails, Apple’s Siri, and Facebook’s tracking cookies that keep monitoring people’s browser activity in order to personalize advertising and content.