First the whole "giving away for free" routine is Social Engineering on a massive scale. There's a reason why it's free. It's toxic. If they charged money for it, people would slow down, think about what they were doing, and reject it. It's malware for a whole lot of other reasons, most of which are well-known to the sycophantic fan-boys here. Why one person would be so passionately in favor of another person installing an Operating System is beyond my ability to understand. They only explanation I can come up with is that someone is paying them to pretend to care about what international perfect strangers have running on their computers. There's no other human reason to explain it. They have to be paid agents. No one pays people to install a good operating system for free, but they do pay people to persuade others to install their malware. It's also why the accusation of being "crazy" and wearing "tin foil hats" is so prevalent here. I've never been on a forum before, that had so many people calling so many other people "crazy". The only explanation for this is that there's some over-arching strategy to marginalize those that correctly identify Windows 10 as malware, and expose the means by which Microsoft intends to infect people's computers with it.
So, don't install it. Why making so big deal about the privacy issues? It already start being freaking annoying. If you are not happy, change it. It's not like you are forced to use a windows operating system.
Yah google and apple do the exact same thing. Actually MS has been doing this since win8. It's just that most people haven't used it.
Microsoft decided to stop fighting againts pirates, because it's a waste of time and cost a lot of money. Now they give the OS for free and they will collect x10 more money than the OS cost by collecting all of our informations. That's what Google is doing since the begining, noone was upset about that up to now.
@ Vladimar: I agree. But still.. there's a bunch of good tweaks/scripts you can find on MDL to 'battle' against this M$ Spyware. With that said, Microsoft really has shown a different face (more a mask), and they don't seem to give a flying ***** about it (which you can figure by the impressive amount of privacy invasive features that they've enabled for us).
They give it away for free, because they missed it -as always- to be up to date. They missed the internet age generally so they had to publish their IE with the OS to kick netscape. They missed the app age so they implemented their lousy app store into their OS where they still have the monopoly on desktop use. Since they realized it that way that the consumers refused to upgrade to w8 they are offering w10 for free The way they go is as always. "We are unable to predict what the consumers need, the competitors are far superior in this regard..to regain market share we enforce the use of our cr*p by implementing it to the OS." This is Microsoft, nothing has changed, actually.
The reason for that is because the majority of people posting here are Windows users, and many of those are Windows fanbois. This isn't a very Linux-centric forum. If you go to Linux forums, or BSD forums, the vibe is very different. It offends Microsoft shills when you speak out against the thing that is bringing them all this wonderful digital content. It's like someone saying that Chevy trucks are s**t. It will start offending people, and those people will start trying to steer the conversation in order to have people agree with their opinion. True, but no user should have to go to this length in order to "battle" their own OS. And even after the tweaks and scripts, nobody knows what the OS is really doing because the source is closed.
No. Nor do I use Facetube, gmail, an unsecured droidphone, or any device beginning with "i". And Windows 10's privacy invasion settings - which is what they are by default - make me look even more favourably to the FreeBSD installs on my machines I made a few months ago because of exactly this kind of thing. Next?
I wouldn't trust Win8+ with any sort of important research projects or government work (U.S.A excluded) In Win8 it was bad enough with the skydrive or whatever it was called. They also used markmonitor servers and some kms verification servers, but we really didn't know the extent. Win10 is just a privacy nightmare. The frigging search bar sends your searches to MS even after turning off all the privacy options. We're going to have to go around and plug all the holes with firewall settings and even then it's a half-ass solution. It might generate system error problems and slow down your system by doing it. I think this just might be the beginning of the Cloud OS they were talking about. They likely want to move the bulk of the OS functions onto the cloud.
Well that's been their dream since they realised people were foolish enough to pay for online gaming with Xbox Live. Monthly subscription fees made Microsoft dream of turning everything into "services". More pure money for less effort. See also; Zune, Groove, the Xbox Live music/video renting, "Skype for Business", "cloud storage (with added data access)" etc. Data mining and selling services is far more profitable. Well, unless you want a decent OS to go with that of course - that would require more effort.
Then wipe your machine, install FreeBSD, and quit whining about an OS you yourself chose to install and use
It's not "I think" and "they likely". It's "They are". Microsoft already admitted it: Nutella himself even did as he read his teleprompter at the Build conference.
If you install, as individual, a "telemetry" program, in this case more than a keylogger, then you sell all the information with that program to 3rd parties and make money, you, my friend, goes to jail for a long time. But if you are a corporation, like m$, its just collecting information to make a better user experience...
Fact that MS is apeing Google and Apple doesn't make its behavior any better. Especially Apple explained practically to MS that 99% of the people don't understand and/or don't care about privacy, about personal data and so on. It's a lost war. And it's lost because the vast majority of the users have yet to realize that there's a war.