[throwaway8503]

It's useful as an excuse for the OS to be continuously connected to the internet, which elides nicely into connecting to the internet for search results when you type something in the searchbox.

And you can't argue that it's /useless/. It's more information, and, ceteris paribus, more information is better.

[giantrobot]

The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell. Every ping to their servers is more and more tracking data on you. If you sign into the OS with a Microsoft account, which is virtually required with Windows 11, they've got all of that data correlated with you personally rather than some ID string.

[try_the_bass]

> The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell.

Why can't it be both? Being data for Microsoft doesn't preclude it from also being data for you. Being able to just put in a query without having to fire up a browser might be a marginal improvement for a lot of people.

And Microsoft doesn't sell you data. No advertising platform does. They sell access to you, by using your data to classify you in ways you can be targeted. It's a subtle difference, but it changes the implications. If someone is making money off of being able to reliably target you based on your data, that means your data is precious to them. Selling it (or losing it) is tantamount to selling their competitive advantage, such as it may be.

[TedDoesntTalk]

This misses the point that I don’t want to see news headlines unless I choose to see news headlines.

[try_the_bass]

I must have missed where that was the point. Can you point it out to me in this thread? There was an earlier mention of the weather widget, but that seems pretty different than "news headlines"?

[gigel82]

They collect data, which is what I hate about Windows too. But I doubt they sell it; it would be a pretty dumb thing to do. That's how they're building their "graph" thing that gets mentioned at every conference.

The same graph that will soon feed into the various Copilots and GPT-things to personalize the heck out of your search and document creation which leads to more usage which leads to more data to feed into the graph.

I'm sure some of that "accidentally leaks" into their ad business too (despite their privacy assurances), but again, I doubt they'd ever sell it to 3rd parties (if nothing else, out of fear of litigation... FAANGs usually take PII handling pretty seriously).