| | | 10 reasons you shouldn't upgrade to Windows 10
10. Ongoing privacy concerns
While you may reasonably argue that Microsoft needs access to all kinds of data to give you the services you demand -- Cortana has to be able to look inside your email and calendar, for example -- the trade-offs between privacy and features is not a simple black-and-white decision.
Microsoft, to its credit, makes no bones about the information it’s collecting in Win10. (Did you know that Windows 8 has an “Advertising ID” that follows you around?) Read my discussion of the pros and cons of the privacy problem and decide for yourself if you’re willing to give and, if so, how much.
Of course, if you’ve been using Google search, Gmail, or Google Drive on a free account, or Chrome, you’ve already been examined 10 ways from Tuesday. Microsoft is entering the Google league, and if you decide to take the plunge, you should do so with your eyes open. Is “Moogled” a word?
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infoworld.com
9. ... 2.
1. Questions, questions, questions
I’m still troubled by how many unanswered questions are floating around. For example, although we haven’t received official confirmation of the fact, it now appears as if the validation sequence goes like this: When you upgrade a “genuine” Win7 or Win8.1 machine to Win10 and run the upgrade in place, Microsoft apparently records a hardware ID that says, “this machine has valid licenses for Win7 and Win10.” At that point, you can install either Win7 or Win10 on that machine, and your license will be validated. We didn’t know that a week ago. Ed Bott wrote about it on ZDNet, but there’s still no official confirmation.
Another example of something we don’t know: How does Windows Update for Business patching really work? Nobody’s seen a WUB server. We also don’t know what the Windows Update advanced option marked “Defer upgrades” really does.
We haven’t yet seen how Microsoft will recover from a really bad update -- although the experience to date with the three Cumulative Updates does not instill confidence. We don’t know if Microsoft will start documenting its patches again. We don’t know if much effort will be directed at fixing and improving the Microsoft-supplied Universal apps.
Most disconcerting of all are the privacy questions. Peter Bright at Ars Technica has a disturbing revelation that, even with all of the Win10 security settings on Off, Win10 still sends some data to the Microsoft Mothership. The simple fact is that Microsoft hasn’t told us what data it’s collecting -- there’s a short note at the end of Bright’s article -- although the EULA says it can do nearly anything with the data it collects. Stack Exchange has an insightful thread on the topic.
All of these are key questions, and we really don’t know the answers. |
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