One of the main concerns with Microsoft’sWindows 10 platform concerns privacy. The operating system has various features that need to access
your private data to work properly. At the same time, Microsoft wants
to deliver you better Bing search results and ads. In its defense, the
company makes it clear in its terms of service that it’s tracking you,
and there are ways to stop all the tracking without compromising your Windows 10 experience. But what if the privacy-infringing settings you thought you just turned off aren’t off? DON’T MISS: How the iPhone 6s could shake up the market for older iPhones this fallAccording to Ars Technica,
even after you tell Microsoft that Windows 10 shouldn’t make any
Internet-related inquiries while you’re using it, it appears that
Windows 10 still pings Microsoft for various information.With Cortana and searching the web from the Start menu disabled, the news site discovered that a request to http://www.bing.com is still made for a file called threshold.appcache
that contains some Cortana information. The request for the file
contains a random machine ID that persists across reboots, even though
Cortana is turned off during this time.It
also seems Microsoft keeps sending data to its servers via its Live
Tiles. Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from Microsoft even if
you clear all the tiles from the Start menu, and it uses unencrypted
HTTP to do so. Ars argues that while the requests do not
contain any identifying information, they shouldn’t be made in the first
place since there’s no corresponding tile for them.Furthermore, Microsoft might be collecting telemetry settings from Windows 10 machines even when such a feature is disabled.More
disturbingly, Windows 10 appears to be able to make requests to a
content delivery network by bypassing any HTTP and HTTPS proxies that
may be set up by the user to monitor Internet traffic.Microsoft told Ars
that whatever communication takes place between a Windows 10 computer
and Microsoft is only there to facilitate the retrieval of updates.“As
part of delivering Windows 10 as a service, updates may be delivered to
provide ongoing new features to Bing search, such as new visual
layouts, styles and search code. No query or search usage data is sent
to Microsoft, in accordance with the customer’s chosen privacy settings.
This also applies to searching offline for items such as apps, files
and settings on the device,” Microsoft said.Ars
says the statement is consistent with its findings. There is no query
or search data transmitted. But at the same time the practice appears to
be a bit on the shady side of business.“[If]
Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the inference
that most people would make is that searching the Start menu wouldn’t
hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic could be innocuous,
but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a suspicious appearance,” Ars wrote.The full post detailing the tech site’s findings is available at the source link.Related storiesWindows 10: Five important questions and the answers you've been seekingHow to fix 5 of the worst bugs in Windows 10Bugged Windows 10 update could force your computer to reboot foreverMore from BGR:I just watched my smartphone case heal itself from scratches
This article was originally published on BGR.com
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