Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing

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  1. Lee
    Posts : 4,793
    OS X, Win 10
       #120

    Winuser said:
    OK' I'll admit I'm stupid so I have to ask. What does MS collecting user data have to do with someone's MS account?
    . . .your not alone with that thought. . .:)
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  2. Lee
    Posts : 4,793
    OS X, Win 10
       #121

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  3. Posts : 750
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bits
       #122

    dencal said:
    For those that wish to know what is being tracked and what can be turned off.
    In All Settings click on Privacy.....note for each item in the left hand column you can choose what you wish.
    Yes, it can be turned off, but...

    Does it actually disable the background process, or just turned off in the user interface? Take for example the WiFi Sense feature, you can turn it off, but doing so does not stop the WiFi connection information being uploaded to MS. You'd need jump through loops to actually disable WiFi sense. While this does not mean that the privacy settings would behave the same way, it certainly does not instill much confidence in these settings.

    The Windows 10 telemetry and diagnostic services are what they are for an OS that sold as a service. The official purpose is that this data slurp enables MS making Windows 10 better and more secure, or something along the line. For an OS that provided as a service, that's somewhat fine. Certainly, there are some questions about the depth of data collection, but it is here to stay.

    On the other hand, Windows 7 and 8.x had been sold as a stand alone OS and not as a service. That did not stop MS from retrofitting these OS' with the same telemetry and diagnostic services. For that matter, Office 2013 had been retrofitted with telemetry data collection as well. So, what's the purpose of retrofitting these systems? The chances are that MS will not make these systems better and more secure the same way as it does Windows 10. In which case, the purpose of these retrofits seem obvious...

    I find it ironic that if the government collects all of your data through their dragnet, most people strongly disagree with it. Pretty much forgetting that the government is just a "central clearinghouse", the actual collection is done by corporations...
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  4. Posts : 10
    Windows 10
       #123

    Cr00zng said:
    Yes, it can be turned off, but...

    Does it actually disable the background process, or just turned off in the user interface? Take for example the WiFi Sense feature, you can turn it off, but doing so does not stop the WiFi connection information being uploaded to MS. You'd need jump through loops to actually disable WiFi sense. While this does not mean that the privacy settings would behave the same way, it certainly does not instill much confidence in these settings.

    The Windows 10 telemetry and diagnostic services are what they are for an OS that sold as a service. The official purpose is that this data slurp enables MS making Windows 10 better and more secure, or something along the line. For an OS that provided as a service, that's somewhat fine. Certainly, there are some questions about the depth of data collection, but it is here to stay.

    On the other hand, Windows 7 and 8.x had been sold as a stand alone OS and not as a service. That did not stop MS from retrofitting these OS' with the same telemetry and diagnostic services. For that matter, Office 2013 had been retrofitted with telemetry data collection as well. So, what's the purpose of retrofitting these systems? The chances are that MS will not make these systems better and more secure the same way as it does Windows 10. In which case, the purpose of these retrofits seem obvious...

    I find it ironic that if the government collects all of your data through their dragnet, most people strongly disagree with it. Pretty much forgetting that the government is just a "central clearinghouse", the actual collection is done by corporations...
    Very good post. Good read and well stated.
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  5. Posts : 112
       #124

    My only complaint with the Metadata collection is the CPU cycles and network traffic. You can say it's minimal, but when market your OS to tablets and 2n1's that have significantly less CPU power it sometimes is not minimal. For the average laptop or desktop you probably won't notice it, assuming you have an avg. broadband connection. However, for the resource constrained, it's annoying. There should be a simple on-off switch. This would also satisfy the tinfoil crowd. Going with analytics, this reduction in data would be fairly small compared to the overall population.
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  6. Posts : 750
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bits
       #125

    MrBill said:
    My only complaint with the Metadata collection is the CPU cycles and network traffic. You can say it's minimal, but when market your OS to tablets and 2n1's that have significantly less CPU power it sometimes is not minimal. For the average laptop or desktop you probably won't notice it, assuming you have an avg. broadband connection. However, for the resource constrained, it's annoying. There should be a simple on-off switch. This would also satisfy the tinfoil crowd. Going with analytics, this reduction in data would be fairly small compared to the overall population.
    A "simple on-off switch", you mean like Apple does in OSX?

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-osx-privacy.jpg

    There's no default for the "Diagnostic and Usage" settings, well, the default is to ask the end user during the installation of OSX. The he/she has to select "Yes' or "No" before the installation proceeds. Is disabling this setting actually disables data collection? AFAICS, yes; at the very least, I have more trust in OSX than I have in Windows from version 7 to 10 from the telemetry perspective...

    The performance impact of the Windows telemetry and diagnostics logging services can be substantial with older hardware. I am sitting next to my Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that has no open applications. Every once in awhile, I hear the CPU fan spinning up that last for a minute or two, meaning that the CPU utilization had increased close to 100%. Opening the task manager shows the "Task Manager" as the only app, can see its CPU utilization around 70% and quickly dropping to zero. At least the scheduled data collection and transfer stops, if and when activity is detected.

    While the T430 is about four years old, it does have a Samsung EVO 850 SSD, 256GB. It's a good thing it does, all of the collections are done a lot faster...
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  7. Posts : 93
    Windows
       #126

    Cr00zng said:
    Every once in awhile, I hear the CPU fan spinning up that last for a minute or two, meaning that the CPU utilization had increased close to 100%. Opening the task manager shows the "Task Manager" as the only app, can see its CPU utilization around 70% and quickly dropping to zero. At least the scheduled data collection and transfer stops, if and when activity is detected.
    That's disk defragmenter, disk cleanup, windows defender and the CLR ngen that always perform scans and cleanup when the machine is idle. Compattelrunner.exe (telemetry) only sends telemetry once a month and doesn't consume any resources doing so.
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  8. Posts : 750
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bits
       #127

    dmex said:
    That's disk defragmenter, disk cleanup, windows defender and the CLR ngen that always perform scans and cleanup when the machine is idle. Compattelrunner.exe (telemetry) only sends telemetry once a month and doesn't consume any resources doing so.
    Windows 10 should be smart enough not to defragment SSD drives. In either case, it does not apply to my system anyway:

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-defrag_sched.jpg

    About a week ego, the system was running on an HDD and that was the last time defragment process had ran.
    Windows Defender is not active, installing an AV disabled it. CLR NGEN, isn't that for developers? It is certainly part of the .Net framework and on my Windows 10 there isn't much of it:

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-dotnet.jpg

    Why would MS need to run "Compattelrunner.exe", isn't that part of the Win10 upgrade utility? Besides, there are many more connections to MS on a much more frequent bases, depending on the type of data collections, updates, etc.

    On a quad-CPU system with SSD drive, the system should not just decide to utilize the resources to the point that the CPU gets a heavy load. Idling or not...
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  9. Posts : 93
    Windows
       #128

    Cr00zng said:
    Windows Defender is not active, installing an AV disabled it.
    Most AVs always do their scans in the background when the system is idle. You could see what's being executed when your machine is idle by disabling the screensaver and running Process Explorer or Process Hacker (Overview - Process Hacker), keep the process list visible and leave the machine to idle for a few minutes and you'll see various processes start up and perform maintenance tasks.


    Cr00zng said:
    CLR NGEN, isn't that for developers? It is certainly part of the .Net framework and on my Windows 10 there isn't much of it
    It's used by 3rd parties but also the entire .NET framework included in every Windows installation. Everything used by the .NET framework (and 3rd party tools) needs to be compiled for your specific machine architecture, ngen does the work of compiling the MSIL into machine code for your architecture and runs when your machine is idle after something queues up the ngen task (e.g. hardware change or anything .NET related that is installed/uninstalled).

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-dotnetngen.png

    It takes a rather long time for ngen to perform these background tasks, You can force ngen to perform all pending tasks by executing the following:

    1. Right-click the start button and select Command Prompt (Admin)
    2. Run the following commands:

    %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe update /force /queue /verbose
    %windir%\microsoft.net\framework64\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe update /force /queue /verbose

    %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe executeQueuedItems /verbose
    %windir%\microsoft.net\framework64\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe executeQueuedItems /verbose

    Prepare for lots of console spam while executing the last two commands, don't worry about any errors you might see as they are perfectly normal. This is what ngen would have done when your machine was idle

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-ngen.png

    Cr00zng said:
    Why would MS need to run "Compattelrunner.exe", isn't that part of the Win10 upgrade utility?
    It's the process that actually does the telemetry collection and upload. Store apps have their own separate telemetry, Windows itself collects driver and software installation failures, Windows Error reports (e.g. crash dumps from BSODs) etc... these are added into compressed CABs for upload sometime later in the month, so if you have had quite a few BSODs or crash dumps, these would use quite a bit of CPU while zipping them up so it's only ever done when the machine is 'idle'.

    From what I've seen this only runs once a month and doesn't re-collect error logs and dumps from the previous month, I have my telemetry set to basic and it's barely even used 10MB of disk/network resources since December.

    Cr00zng said:
    Besides, there are many more connections to MS on a much more frequent bases, depending on the type of data collections, updates, etc.
    The telemetry used by Store apps is separate to the telemetry from Windows itself and they can only run when you're using them (I think they only do their uploads once a month too). I don't use any store apps so I don't know much about how they work other than whats listed here (Application Insights is what nearly all Store apps use for their telemetry): Application Insights - app monitoring| Microsoft Azure

    Cr00zng said:
    On a quad-CPU system with SSD drive, the system should not just decide to utilize the resources to the point that the CPU gets a heavy load. Idling or not...
    Try executing the ngen commands above and you'll see a lot of work being done to keep things optimized. There are quite a few other maintenance tasks from other apps such as Chrome and Anti-virus software that also have 'idle' triggers.

    The only real way to find what is being done in the background is by doing what I described above and disabling the screensaver and have PE or PH showing the process list when your machine is idle... Over a few weeks you'll start to notice quite a few maintenance tasks being done by lots of different software and the telemetry is nowhere near as resource hungry as the other tasks.

    You can actually view the resource usage of the Telemetry process using the built-in Windows Task Manager.

    1. Open Task Manager
    2. Select the App History tab
    3. Select the View menu and click the "Show History for All Processes" menu.
    4. Locate the entry for "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry"

    It's just rolled over into the new month 3 days ago. Here are the top resource hog items on my system recorded just in the last 3 days:

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-task_manager.png

    Here is the Telemetry process... As you can see it's barely even used any resources:

    Revealed! Crucial detail that Windows 10 privacy critics are missing-task_manager2.png
    Last edited by dmex; 08 Mar 2016 at 23:20. Reason: typos
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  10. Posts : 750
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bits
       #129

    Great post dmex, thanks!

    You are correct... Most AVs do background and scheduled scans, if you enable them. On this system, these are disabled, but the real-time protection is on that could not cause high CPU load. The definition update is scheduled daily, instead of the default 30 minutes.

    I've seen ngen in action, after the Windows update. It didn't take long, but caused the CPU fan to spin up.

    The app history for this system does not have the "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" process, but the system is only ten days old. That might be due to couple of reasons, other than being "too young". One is that this system is a clean install of Windows 10 Professional 64-bit. The other is the custom installation, where everything that could be disabled had been disabled during the installation routine. Afterward, every telemetry services, schedules and processes that had been identified as unnecessary were disabled. The default apps that could be uninstalled had been uninstalled, while others disabled in either startup and/or removed from the background process. That includes Cortana as well, the taskbar shows "Search Windows" only.

    The only telemetry agent that shows up in the app history is "Office Telemetry Agent", it used one second CPU time before it had been disabled.

    This laptop haven't been used much as of yet, it is in the process of building it that includes disabling telemetry and other chatty services. It's not that I'd have anything to hide, I don't. I just want to, or rather like to control what's going on with the OS and apps. Off to remove OneDrive, it's getting on my nerves with its popups...
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