[gcb0]

and the alternatives are?

osX invented all this. MS is just catching up. and apple don't even allow you to disable things.

android? chrome alone sends more info than whole windows 10+edge.

now, you could say Linux. but sadly your grand mother has no publicly available product she can buy with that OS.

[realusername]

I've installed Elementary OS to my parents home computer and I never do anything on it, it seems easy enough to use even for people without any computer knowledge. There are way better Linux distributions now compared to what it was before.

Also compared to windows, I don't need to check that they installed some IncrediBar software which is changing the homepage all the time, this is much better for me. Also I don't know how to explain that but the i18n is incredible compared to Windows and it's much more translated even in system parts, there is no english words to scare away my parents. It just feels more pure in terms of translation.

[pdkl95]

> no publicly available product

Yes. Sometimes doing the right thing to protect your rights and the rights of others requires sacrifice. Freedom is not always free (as in beer).

As long as you insist that any potential alternative have the same features, you might as well give up. The incumbent can always create and market a new "feature" guaranteeing any alternative is always playing catch-up.

As time goes on, the lock-in increases and the cost of change becomes more expensive. Do you want to pay this cost now. or do you want to pay an even higher cost in the future after Microsoft - emboldened by the profits from selling user data to their "partners" - decides to make the spying even more invasive?

Do you even want to own a General Purpose Computer? You better make a decision quickly; when Intel's SGX instructions become widespread, it will be next to impossible to disable these "important security features".

[listic]

Thanks for bringing SGX into my attention!

I thought I was more or less following the development of PC hardware, but I never heard of this one, and it's not very new already. Wikipedia article [1] on the subject is surprisingly concise, and only quotes Intel homepage on the subject.

Do you have any pointers to independent discussion or analysis of this technology? As with all such new technologies, it might require more than just reading its name or manufacturer's description to understand its implications: like e.g. with Trusted Execution Technology, it takes some research to form an opinion: is it actually about me, the computer's user, or someone else who is going to trust this computer?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions

[zeidrich]

And I think that's the biggest issue is that Microsoft makes it pretty easy to disable them.

Most of these settings are all in the same place, right where you set up the OS.

In my opinion, none of them have to be off. I understand why they're being collected, and I don't mind that information being collected, and I like the things like the predictions as features.

But I do appreciate that they can be turned off. Another OS might just add those things but not make them something you could opt out of at all.

I mean, even Ubuntu went and sent all of your search data to Amazon by default for a while without any simple way to opt out of it, which to me is worse than Microsoft itself collecting Cortana data with the ability to turn the option off at install time.

But the thing about allowing people to choose to turn those features off (or even on) means that they're aware that they're there, while other people can just slip them in as a tiny line somewhere in the privacy policy and not allow you to configure those settings at all.

[cdubzzz]

Could you provide some references for all of that?

Also, there are at least a couple of "publicly available" products one could buy preloaded with Linux. Even Dell has an offering: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd

[segf4ult]

You can now buy laptops preinstalled with Ubuntu directly from dell.

[gcb0]

you can buy ONE laptop with Linux from dell. and even that one is advertised only to developers.

[JustSomeNobody]

https://system76.com/laptops/?utm_source=google_search&utm_m...

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/ubuntu/index.html

[gcb0]

i clicked your HP link. (because the 76 ones are only desktop computers disguised as laptops, really)

then clicked the laptops link.

then clicked every single one of the models and clicked customize.

every single one of the options were Windows 7, 8, 10. Only.

did you manage to go from that page to any actual product you could just enter your credit card and receive with ubuntu?

PS: i should tell you that i'm not being pessimistic. just realistic. My current personal computer is an Asus eeepc-1000, from 2007 or so. the very first netbook with SSD that shipped with linux. i replaced the asus distro garbage with debian right away, but i got it with linux for the meaning of it.

[sosuke]

I think there are a few Dell Linux machines, Linux laptops are available.

[JadeNB]

> osX invented all this. MS is just catching up. and apple don't even allow you to disable things.

I was pretty sure that I had disabled all my Mac's and iPad's "phone home" behaviours. (Of course, technically, iPad and iPhone are iOS, not OS X.) There are certainly a lot of dials to twiddle, but I thought that I'd hit them all and had found a reasonable amount of privacy (at considerable expense of functionality). What are the non-disable-able features?

[rufugee]

Can you expound upon your OS X comment?

[gcb0]

can't you search "osx phone home" if you're really interested?

even wired, which usually drink the apple cool aid, reported on it during Yosemite. though the app store reporting is mostly ignored by non geeks, so search deeper for that

[rufugee]

Will do.