Microsoft has a commanding control of the world's PC market, and now the company wants even more control over its users' data.
This is all, of course, in an effort to better improve the experience of using Microsoft's latest and greatest Windows 10 operating system, or so the company says. Albeit Windows 10 is arguably a much better product than Windows 7 and Windows 8.
So as the rest of the world transitions into Microsoft's latest operating system (with the slick "helping hand" of Microsoft by including Windows 10 in Windows Update), Microsoft will have even more access to users' data with tracking features even the company itself can't stop. Moreover, the Redmond-based company says its ability to track users is actually for the user's benefit, too.
"And in the case of knowing that our system that we've created is crashing, or is having serious performance problems, we view that as so helpful to the ecosystem, and so not an issue of personal privacy, that today, we collect that data so that we make that experience better for everyone," Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore argued.
Why users would want their location tapped and their every keystroke logged by a corporation for their own benefit sounds quite fishy; it is only applicable for individual users. Microsoft continues to treat a corporation and an average consumer differently from each other. Windows 10 Pro and Windows Enterprise users will have the option to disable automatic updates and tick off all of the data the operating system wants to send back to the mothership.
On the other hand, users on Windows 10 Home will be forced to download automatic updates. It doesn't stop there either. The basic offering of Windows 10 also controls how much bandwidth a user consumes, display ads in the Start Menu, log every key press on the keyboard, download a user's browser history, and much more. These are all described in the End User License Agreement (EULA) each user is required to agree to before making use of the operating system (if the user even bothers to thoroughly read through it).
Fortunately, the worst of Microsoft's spy software can be disabled. To do so, a user must edit their privacy settings from the Start Menu to Settings and finally to Privacy, and from there disable as much of it as possible. Unfortunately, not all tracking options can be turned off and Microsoft can't do anything about it even if it wanted to.
