[LINK] Vista - the data gatherer

[Scott Howard]

On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 06:56:38PM +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
> And one other thing - which of these flows are actually beneficial to
> the user? I don't mean the soft-soap BS like "help us make a better
> product", I mean actual, real benefits.
> 
> My guess is: None.

My guess would be that you haven't even looked at the list, correct?
To pick one of the more obvious example, the "Plug and Play" system
certainly does add value to users by downloading the correct drivers
for their new hardware. And clearly to do that it needs to pass back
the details of the hardware you've just installed.

It's also important to note that this isn't a list of functions that
will forward details to Microsoft - it's a list of anywhere that
personal data may be collected and/or forwarded - even locally! eg,
the 'Speech Recognizer' states that it collects details of your speech
patterns and the like, and that this "information is not sent to
Microsoft", but that "Administrators can access any profile on the
computer".  Then there's "Windows Calendar" where the "Information that
you enter in your calendars is stored locally on your computer."



As far as "help us make a better product", this type of information does
benefit the user community - as a whole at least.  Until recently I was
involved in the development of Sun's "Explorer" product, which collects
data from customers systems and forwards it to Sun (with the customers
full permission, of course!)

The data we were able to obtain from the corpus of Explorer data was
invaluable.  The knowledge that X% of users are running a specific
configuration or program allows the company to focus development on
areas that customers are actually using, for example.

The challenge is in getting the amount of data right, and this certainly
isn't easy to do. But looking through the Vista list I'm having trouble
finding anything that I'd be concerned with Microsoft knowing.

  Scott.