This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is AFTER debloating all the MS bs as much as I can.
The amount of MS telemetry is just mindboggling.
While telemetry is bad the problem here is probably that this windows service pings the server but doesn't get a response because it got stuck in your pihole. So it tries to pings again and again and again and again...
The best solution would be to disable telemetry to the capacity you are capable or is possible without breaking something and block pings as backup to when it's enabled again with updates and repeat.
As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.
To me, telemetry would be like a sofa company wanting to put some cameras in your home to see if you're using the sofa the way they thought you would. It just feels... off.
“90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”.
Imo, a simple opt-in crash report gets the job done. Technically it is telemetry, but a crash report is more justified than a "where have you clicked" report.
telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold
There's just no trust in companies to not sell my data. I cannot trust Microsoft nor Google nor any other company to not sell my data, having seen the shenanigans every single company is willing to pull off to get a cent more a year.
In general I agree, but users should be able to make that decision themselves. I do not understand why you can't turn off telemetry, when it would be trivial to offer that option and so few users would bother to use it.
users should be able to make that decision themselves.
Agreed
I do not understand why you can't turn off telemetry,
It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
As a programmer: "your data is boring. I am not interested in leveraging this for anything besides getting the service you are using to work as well as possible"
Also me as a programmer: "yo, you don't need that data, stop asking for it. Ohh, your app is broken because it can't access permissions? Yeet."
I don't want you to know anything about me or my device. Simple as
How about shit breaking because everyone at some point is a bad programmer? Even Apple Music doesn’t work when I walk into the elevator until halfway through presumably because hitting play sets of a bunch of useless blocking network calls for music I have saved locally.
What those calls are, I can’t say for sure. Downloading artwork, license checks or telemetry. I’d venture to guess it’s the latter since music will play with placeholder artwork on a slow connection and license checks aren’t required if the subscription was recently validated (works offline for days).
But who really knows. I never bothered to inspect the traffic. The point is, if a company like Apple is creating such a crummy experience for a function so absurdly basic, you can imagine how easy and prevalent telemetry based user degradation is. Go browse the web with a tracker blocker and tell me it isn’t snappier.
PS: I’m also a programmer and collect error reports. So many developers will forego using connection pools, much less collect data with async api’s.
And let’s not even get into how telemetry is a shit tool that is misused 99.99% of the time and only used to surface popular features that aren’t necessarily good features only because we attach causation to every metric (x feature is highly used, therefore it must be good).
So why not ask, "hey you want to share some telemetry to help us improve the product" then?
It's what all reputable companies or projects, I am aware of, do.
Do you consider Microsoft a "reputable company?"
Yes, but maybe “reputable” isn’t the right word. Realistically, it’s anyone who would potentially face billions in a class-action lawsuit and could actually afford to pay up without going bankrupt. It’s just not worth the risk to getting a few extra $million to pull in telemetry data to the already expansive list of marketing data they collect and monetize.
For example, I would doubt that Hearthstone (Blizzard, revenue $8.7B) sells their app telemetry data. But I could definitely believe that Hill Climb Racer (Fingersoft, revenue $30M) does, or at least integrates it with ad targeting products.
A few things (and I enable it usually, for the record):
Policies get updated, companies are bought and sold, laws change, and most crucially of all, data gets leaked. It doesn't matter how airtight your asshole is puckered up or how many isolated networks are involved. It gets leaked. Leave the decision up to users about it and in particular maybe let them have full control of their networks.
Don't get fooled by the insane amount of hits, when it's not reachable it will try over and over
The future:
"Malwarebytes has flagged your entire operating system as potential malware"
Lol....... :/
...pay 9.99 to have us do nothing
Lol. They are a shit company. (Microsoft & Malwarebytes)
First time I've heard someone say Malwarebytes sucks. Is this more of a "Recent update makes it bad" thing or "The company behind this software is horrible"? Personally I've never had a problem with them.
Well blocking these calls obviously inflates the numbers due to retries.
Devil’s advocate: basically the only proper way to figure out how people are using your product and how you can tweak it to achieve its goal is by firing events and including relevant metadata such as how much time they spent on a screen or how far they scrolled. Telemetry is not necessarily “evil” by default.
The other side of that is that the telemetry data never gives you a "why" of something.
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about what to do, or they are confused by the options and can't figure out which option they need.
This is why a QA team coupled with a large amount of beta testers is invaluable and necessary.
Telemetry, in the context of software development and UX design, is either a decision by the misinformed or just an excuse to save costs by axing the Windows QA department.
In reality it's likely the data is being sold off. But in either case, that's data Microsoft isn't entitled to (from a moral/privacy perspective).
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about
... anything!
what am I gonna eat?
I should remember to feed the bicycle...
who stole my cat btw?
who am I to judge?
who am I?
what's the meaning of life?
what's the meaning of finding it?
what's the meaning of figuring out what the meaning is of finding it???
I totally agree, but where I have a problem (and I imagine a lot of other users here) is that you can't fully opt out. You can only set "minimal" tracking but not none.
Those events are used by all of these services:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-11-endpoints-non-enterprise-editions
Literally everything, from Windows to Office to OneDrive to Cortana to diagnostics.
Something is seriously wrong with your Windows 11 install. I have two Windows 11 devices on my network and a Surface Duo 2.
Conviva is "video streaming analytics." Any site with video content is trying to track who uses it, how long they watch, etc.
It has become really nasty for sure...
But I can't really blame them. Who wouldn't want to know? And who doesn't do it? It's just always MS who gets shit on for doing it. Everything and everyone tracks our every movement and click. If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started.
Don't get me wrong, i effing abhor these things from the depths of my nerdy heart and do everything to block them all. But we just can't avoid it anymore. We can just hope to get it all blocked or that it at least only sends anonymous usage-data and nothing else.
And who doesn't do it?
OSS operating systems. The more proprietary software you run, the less and less you actually own your computer and the more it becomes a tool to advance the interests of megacorps.
we just can’t avoid it anymore
Speak for yourself. Besides, all-or-nothing privacy is a false dichotomy. Giving out less personal data is still better than giving out everything, and you don't need 100% privacy to be unprofitable to advertisers.
If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started
That's a good one! But to be fair, Apple calls home just as much. They just don't sell that data (yet).
As does Android. I'm not sure why we would give MS a by for this. They're all as bad as each other and all deserve to be blocked as comprehensively as possible.
Desktop linux doesn't have any of this. And one day we'll get real linux on phones too (with full featured support).
Join us.... become Linux nerd, never look back. Hate that the one or two software you use that has no viable equivalent is either super janky or doesn't work on wine even though tons of games outperform windows... with the windows build.
Or battle telemetry for several years until you get forced to subscribe to win 12.
Only reason I use Win 11 is a single proprietary DRM software I have to deal with on a daily basis. I find almost everything more comfortable in Linux than Windows. I also don't play games so it's honestly painless.
Wait till you plug in your cell phone to charge they start calling home like crazy
All hail GrapheneOS
Yeah, I recently did it for a lab and it was... interesting.
My Ubuntu VM wasn't particularly great either but it was the one that my uni provided
Ubuntu lost me years ago. I still use the server version for.. servers. If you want something rawk sawlid for servers, go Ubuntu. Otherwise, go Pop. Or Elementary. Or Mint.
Don’t like your hand held? Fedora.
Hate yourself? Arch.
Draw your entire personality from knowing what a transistor is? Gentoo.
I have other ways of disabling those telemetry reports.
O&O shutup 10 and adguard for desktop allow the user to turn off a lot of bullshit.
I stopped using my Pihole because it kept eating SD cards. If that wasn't an issue would love to be using it still.
I can recommend for that. It logs to RAM and only writes to the SD card once a day (or more/less, if you choose).
It's a must while using PiHole imo.
