king of 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
A lot of conspiracy theories revolve around the ability to cover up any sort of leak, especially with rich entities, and this one is no exception. Things are leaked all the time, from bigger and more important places too. Valuable government documents and source codes are leaked more than often.
My point doesn't actually revolve around it. I'm simply specifying that microsoft obviously has a way to keep employees in line and ways to prevent the vast majority of leaks, considering that it hasn't happened yet. It in no way affects the fact that Microsoft has the ability to pull any file from your harddrive at any time.
But even if Microsoft's data could be collected, to what use is it?
There's a whole lot of use, here's a few:
- Blackmail
- private investigating
- Insider trading (This is a big one, worth potentially billions of dollars)
- Identity theft
- Any other number of reasons that involve stealing someone's personal info
That mandatory disclosure picture you keep posting deliberately leaves out the fact that it's specifically for court orders and protection of privacy. You make it appear like it is collected at all times or one a whim, despite being very limited. It's not a scam, it's cooperation with law enforcement and a means to protect you and themselves. Even if it was, it is never put to use as so that anything but a bot or probably an investigator will see. And I really don't care about that.
It doesn't actually say it's restricted to court orders, it says it will only share your info if it complies with the law. I'm not aware of any laws currently in effect that would allow for it in any way besides a court order, but if CISA passes (Which believe me it might), any company is legally allowed to sell and share their data with any law enforcement agency including the NSA. Their mass data sharing will comply with the law (And hence be allowed by their privacy policy) and anyone in potentially even a local law enforcement position could pull up your private emails and files
without a court order,
without due process. There's endless possibility for abuse and willy-nilly just-for-fun file searching.
Now, the reason I still don't like it, regardless of whether or not it's claimed to be for our protection, regardless of whether or not it's "restricted" to court orders, is that it gives them the ability to spy on me: A law abiding citizen. I haven't done anything wrong, so they don't need to spy on me. They should not have the ability to spy on me in the first place. Simple as that.
I remember saying this:
It's like this, but more digital: I don't want the local police spying on me in the shower (And other places around the house), so when they ask me to install cameras I'm going to respectfully decline. They try to explain that they'll only activate them if they have a good faith that someone's broken into the house, but I decline, saying that I don't want any possibility of abuse.
Also, if a hacker ever figures out how microsoft gets data off of the computers and how to do it themselves (which is a real possibility), everyone on win10 is royally forgeted. It's a matter of privacy and security
Which still applies wholly. I don't care if it's to supposedly keep people safe, it's still spying, and I'm going to exercise my human right to privacy because I don't want people snooping into my digital home.
It's not like having one camera parked at my electric meter, it's literally having one covering every corner of the house. They can grab ANYTHING. Any file, any email, any personal info, and that's going way over the line of acceptable data collecting.
To continue to post that image, specifically cutting it off before the prerequisites of such data collection, is not very honest. With the full context, it sounds like something they are required to put stating how they work with legal suits and fraud, not another batch they collect at will.
It's completely honest because legally a company cannot be forced to do extremely invasive data collecting, the only reason they're doing it is because they
want to. It's not a need. They could leave their hundreds of millions of law abiding customers alone, but they decided not to. Again, it's about
accessibility of data, not just accessing.
It's also completely honest because it's the only part that matters: Them having the ability to access all of your data.
I'm also going to reiterate that hackers are a
serious problem. Hackers can get into just about anything, and Microsoft more than likely is not an exception from that. If they get access to a file collection utility, everyone on win10 is royally forgeted. That not only adds to the accessibility but also adds to the accessing.
EDIT: Added another potential use for personal data.
EDIT: Fixed quote author, dunno how that happened
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