The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161834   Message #3874922
Posted By: DaveRo
03-Sep-17 - 03:07 AM
Thread Name: Tech: Computer backup: Win10/11, external HDD fail
Subject: RE: Tech: Computer backup - Win10, UPS, external HDD
I only fire up my Windows 10 occasionally to test stuff, and have no great interest in its telemetry, but here's my 2 cents' worth.

All serious software needs feedback from real installations to identify and diagnose problems and find out how real people use it. Android certainly does - including the opensource version - and I'm sure iOS does. Firefox does: there is a team collecting and analysing crash date (recently the rollout of v55 was stopped when a spike of crashes were seen) and features are occasionally 'retired' when it's found that so few people use them it's not worth the cost of maintaining them.

The problem is that telemetry - as it's fairly recently become known - is often misrepresented - 'phoning home', 'spying', etc, and the majority of web articles are predicated on the assumption that you want to turn it off. Given that attitude by commentators I have some sympathy with Microsoft - who need this data - making it difficult. There's an analogy somewhere here with vaccination - if a few people disable it it doesn't matter, but if a lot of people do ...

MS need to be more open and positive about what they collect and why. Maybe they're doing this:
Microsoft opens up on Windows telemetry, tells us most of what data it collects
And to stop using phrases like 'improving the user experience'!

So my view is, by all means turn things like this off - I do - but it's not as intrusive and sinister as most web commentators want you to think.

The next major update to Windows 10 is in October, BTW.