felsiq

Ah, if privacy was violated and nobody heard it, did it make a noise and all that.

Hypothetical for you, to test this assertion: some sicko puts a camera in a school changeroom, gets all the footage of kids they want and removes the camera before they’re caught. Privacy was violated and nobody heard it - did it make a noise?

And yes, this is very much a non-sequitur because like I said, I’m replying only to the portion of your comment I first highlighted - not weighing in on anything else, just saw incorrect info and added more context. Also, the fact that you trust them is great, but irrelevant - notice we’ve gone back to their pinky promise where you’ve just chosen to accept it (which again, valid and I’m not attacking that choice). You also seem to be conflating the personal data (literally pictures and documents) that M$ has already stolen with the more conventional data “theft” of browsing data, buying habits, etc.
This isn’t an instance of google selling your interest in some product, it’s Microsoft having access to personal files that people don’t even know have left their computer.

Another hypothetical: an innocent person with something to hide from their tyrannical government gets a windows computer, sets it up normally and migrates their data. They of course might think their own local storage on their own pc locked behind a strong password is a safe place to put whatever incriminating evidence they need to hide, so into documents it goes (and then right onto Microsoft’s servers). Now with one request from their government, Microsoft is legally obligated to hand over their data (which they conveniently have complete access to, unknown to the innocent person). Substitute the innocent person’s “crime” and the tyrannical government with whatever you prefer, and this is exactly the “practical application” of privacy you don’t believe in. Whether it’s being LGBTQ+ in parts of the world, a political dissenter in an authoritarian state, or anything else - believing that “local storage” on your own PC actually belongs to you should not be enough to get someone jailed or killed, but it (extremely) plausibly is.
Again, this is a problem not just because Microsoft has both the key and the lock to people’s data, but also because many of these people literally do not know. They’re not choosing to trust Microsoft because “nah they wouldn’t do that”, like you are - the choice has been stolen from them.

Not of whether the data is somewhere or being used for something, but about whether it could have been in some parallel reality, where nothing short of making the data physically impossible to access is a valid outcome.

I also wanna note that you say that like it’s an unachievable goal that’s unrealistic to expect, but it’s very achievable and already reasonably common. Properly end to end encrypted cloud solutions (where the users KNOWINGLY store their files) that don’t have access to the encryption keys are out there - even Apple has one.

But there's a magnificent leap from there to "Microsoft is probably secretly accessing your cloud stored data for shits and giggles, and even if they aren't you wouldn't know if they did, so they're probably lying about it"

Interesting rephrasing of what I actually said, which was “Microsoft is capable of secretly accessing your (presumed) local stored data, with no proper oversight to actually prevent this”. I think if you reread what I said you’ll see that I stated facts (their capabilities to do these things) rather than making unprovable assertions (which would be pointless, because as previously noted there’s no way for anyone to prove or disprove that it happened). It also (in your hypothetical where it’s proven) would - according to nearly all historical precedent - lead to at worst a slap on the wrist for Microsoft. I would love to be wrong about this part, and I can only hope that someday it happens and you get to say “I told you so” lmao

I disagree with your dismissal of windows’ security implications for companies, but to avoid mixing up concepts I’m focusing only on the end user privacy aspect.

And regulation, while worthwhile and something we should definitely be working on, is still functionally irrelevant in an environment where there’s realistically no way for anyone outside of M$ themselves to detect any violations. The plain facts are that M$ is fully capable of accessing end users’ private data without user consent or awareness (or even awareness that M$ has the data at all, in many cases). With no realistic way for them to be caught doing this, regulations or no this boils down to a matter of trust that they won’t - again, basically a pinkie promise. Sure, if they broke that promise (and you somehow managed to catch them in it) you could sue them, but again this does nothing to change the fact that they are fully capable of accessing the data.

Choosing to use windows and onedrive anyway despite knowing this, like I said before, is a valid choice as long as and only if it’s a choice that you knowingly make for yourself. It’s the wrong choice imo, especially when plenty of other services that do the same thing without the ability to access your shit exist, but as long as people are making that choice for themselves I don’t have a problem with it. Its acting like it’s unreasonable to push people to be aware of these facts and make their own informed choices is unreasonable that I disagree with.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the impacts of companies using windows at all - everything I said was meant in the context of an end user environment. Even more specifically, I’m only talking about privacy (never even used the word security) and I was replying only to where you mentioned their telemetry not affecting user data, to point out that they unapologetically steal user data separately from the telemetry. The data may be encrypted, and technically “secure” from other actors, but Microsoft holds the encryption keys so the only thing standing between them and your personal files you might believe are private is “pinkie promise we won’t look”.

Does this mean bill gates is personally browsing any random person’s photos libraries? Obviously not, but the fact that nothing technically prevents M$ from using the encryption keys (that they store for you) to unlock your “secure” data on their servers that you may not even know they’ve taken is absolutely something that anyone in that position should know. That’s putting significant trust in M$ - which again, many people in this position did not do and did not know they were forced to.

Hopefully this clarifies if it seemed like I was mixing up concepts - I’m tired as fuck and probably not as coherent as I’d like to be. Still, I don’t believe I’ve “made up” anything or even been hyperbolic - other than my pet conspiracy theory about their reasoning behind the setup process and telemetry prompt, everything I wrote is imo a verifiable fact and if you disbelieve any part of it I’m happy to provide sources. (Edited to add: later, right now I need sleep lol)

This is absolute poetry
In the hopes of more of this, what are your thoughts about Inter?

Question for you or anybody else using voyager who sees this: is your username the same color as OP’s? I assumed there’d be different colors (like ik red is for the instance admin) but yours looks the same color as the OP’s and now I’m questioning if I’m even more colorblind than I realized lmao
Also, seconding the ‘thank you’s, you’ve made a really great app and I really appreciate all the work you’ve done to get it to this point!

Edited to add: thank you everybody, turns out I’m just colorblind lol

This context together with your username is an uncomfortable reminder of the jar

Well, for one, I have no information regarding MS keeping mandatory telemetry of Windows application usage or data (at least outside their own software suite). As far as I know what is there is opt-in and does not extend to keeping any copies of your computer data

I’m not gonna start ranting about their mandatory telemetry, but I do gotta note this is a hell of an issue to ignore (considering the windows telemetry “opt-in” during setup boils down to “want us to take ALL your data, or just whatever we want?”). That aside, Microsoft’s setup process is imo designed to make people think exactly what you’ve written - the telemetry is the invasive part, and (*deep huff of copium*) maybe they won’t steal any of my juiciest data. I honestly think they deliberately made their telemetry prompts a little abrasive, so that anyone who gives half a shit about privacy will focus on that part and see it as the privacy violating aspect of a new windows computer or install.

Meanwhile, as soon as you’re logged in to your new windows OS your user folders have been stored in onedrive by default - so that all your documents, desktop, etc get sent straight to Microsoft. You can migrate all your files from your old pc - dump all those medical and tax records right in your documents, where they get sent straight out to Microsoft’s servers without ANY consent or even awareness from most users. Most windows users I talk to don’t even know anything’s up until they start getting warnings about using up all their onedrive storage, and by that point M$ has all their shit and the damage can’t be undone. Sure, you can move the folders back out of the onedrive path (good luck explaining how to anyone who isn’t tech savvy) and onedrive is “””end to end encrypted””” (which is a joke when M$ has the encryption keys), but the reality is they’ve deliberately made windows trick people into allowing their personal files to be stolen. Dark patterns like these are all throughout the OS, and they’re a big part of why the proselytism you mentioned absolutely is a worthwhile goal for its own sake. Using windows is choosing to engage with a manipulative and untrustworthy entity that’s actively hostile to your privacy, and the worst part is most people don’t even realize it IS a choice. Like most choices, it’s got pros and cons - knowing you have other options doesn’t mean you have to choose them, and if someone wants to keep using windows to play their kernel-level anticheat competitive games or something that’s fair enough. I just think they absolutely need to be aware of what their choice is costing them (and the people around them due to network effects) both for their own risk management and because you can’t truly make a choice without information. “OS activism” is the only hope to actually fix or even salvage this situation, lacking any government willing and able to meaningfully regulate tech companies.

Wow that last line is exactly what I needed to hear, thank you

I get this perspective, but I don’t personally wanna use it cuz “costs advertisers” == “rewards ad companies” and it’s the ad companies I have a problem with more than whatever random company decides to pay for an ad. Punishing companies for intrusive advertising is great, but not if it’s making even more money for Facebook/google/whatever fucked up company is the actual driving cause of the ad industry’s state.

I get what you mean - in any particular case it might not be possible to ever prove that the murder was actually morally justified, so maybe we’re just giving some batshit crazy stab-happy lady a pass for no reason. Still, even if we can’t know whether or not it was morally justified, we can and do know that the conditions that would justify it were common enough that I’m personally comfortable with the odds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For any modern day (western society, anyway) examples you have a really good point, but keep in mind for women in the recent past there would realistically not be any “due process” if they even managed to get an abuser into a courtroom.

“I hunted this guy down and killed him cuz he was an asshole” is very different from “I had no way to escape this guy and I did what I had to to get away”. The fact that these women had to resort to murder to get away from their abusers is disgusting, but until/unless I live thru a situation like theirs I’ll personally save my judgement for the system that put them in that position rather than the women themselves.

If your goal was a boring and bland post, I gotta say you screwed that up pretty bad. Please keep us updated on the cheap knives quest!