According to the company's privacy statement, some of the information collected include "your typed and handwritten words", emails, conversations users have with the digital assistant, Cortana, location data and selections, such as stocks a user follows in a finance app, or the team a user supports in a sports app. Articles detailing privacy concerns have appeared in The Guardian, Newsweek and the Financial Times.It looks like the attention Microsoft is getting for privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 is mostly to do with default settings. It also appears that Microsoft treats biometric information differently by default, not sharing it even with trusted third-party developers.
In the statement supplied Monday, the company says Microsoft does not sell the information customers provide it, but makes it available to employees and third-party engineers to improve Microsoft services.
Users can choose the level of information they send to it and selectively remove the information that Cortana, the digital assistant, tracks, while no biometric data from Windows Hello is shared with third parties, the company said.
Two of the issues, surrounding Wifi Sence and how Windows Update Delivery Optimization (WUDO), are covered very well by The Hacker News which provides simple instructions for how to address them by changing default settings.
Reading through both of the Hacker News pieces, a picture of Windows 10 emerges that shows Microsoft giving serious thought to how make connectivity simpler with Wifi Sense while making the Windows ecosystem more resilient to the security threats already out there and those that easier connectivity implies with WUDO.
