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How about turning Windows into an advertising and data collection platform. Sucking up vast amounts of people's personal data, even corporate data, to leverage against their customers so that MS can take in more profit.


I'm much less concerned about this -- as far as I'm aware, the data collection is standard telemetry that any software provider would want, and the stuff related to advertising is, I think, largely concerned with app recommendations in the Microsoft store -- than I am about anti-competitive bundling practices.


Microsoft may call what they collect telemetry, but it goes way beyond what I'd want or expect to shared with a bunch of strangers at whatever company made the software I'm using. It'd take a whistleblower (or more likely multiple whistleblowers) for us to know everything MS is doing with that data, but they've been shoving ads all over the OS for a long time.

I'm struggling to think of a part of the OS that hasn't had ads shoved into it... the terminal I guess... There have been ads in the start menu, the lock screen, in pop up notices, in the file explorer, in search results, in the control panel, on the task bar, in the share pane, in windows update and in a bunch of windows apps like ink workspace. They've even just force-installed random programs to people's systems.


That (edit: second paragraph) is fair and a good point. Maybe Android has desensitized me to advertising and crap-/bloatware.

I'd wager, too, that the addition of the garbage you're describing has coincided with the OS's worsening performance. File Explorer performance is so abysmal that it may as well be an Electron app.

On the other hand (edit: regarding your first paragraph), Microsoft seems very serious about not falling afoul of the law, probably because of the cost of the anti-trust litigation they faced in the 90s and 2000s(?). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were nothing for a whistleblower to blow the whistle on.




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