Use a local account only and do not link it to any cloud accounts as to my best understanding is this is the big thing that enables the tracking/collecting. Sure you don’t get to use office 365/skydrive/etc/etc but then all they have is some local account named foobar and very little if any information sent to the mothership.
you could still use all the web versions of those apps though.
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true, i don’t mostly cause i don’t really need them. office 365 on the whole when I checked it out looks like a great deal if you have a family who all need access to office as you get tablet licenses and skydrive space per user. as it is i can get a 2 install license for regular office via work for like $10 so go with that and then it is the wife that uses it mostly. if they switch to a cheap 365 price i will probably go with that.
Sounds like yet another case for analyzing your network traffic packets. And maybe making a decent firewall.
I’d turn it off, just like in this case. I agree opt-in would be better than opt out.
I’m just playing with some of the overly-paranoid concern I see online when stuff like this pops up. I’m reminded of the arm flailing that people engaged in, when CCTV cameras and phone cameras started to become commonplace–turns out those cameras probably do more good than harm, as BoingBoing often shows.
I’m a bit more worried about the privately owned drones BB appears to endorse.
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Gee, a kid could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
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Now Microsoft has a moral obligation to make their operating system open source.
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Microsoft does have certain reporting requirements to the EU, doesn’t it?
Would you mind expanding on this a bit?
A lot of those people–not all of them, but enough-- are bad parents. Being trans and spending a decent amount of time in pride groups, I’ve known countless people who’d probably be kicked out of their homes if their parents chose to monitor them at this level. (even in my case, where my parents were pretty accepting, I still wouldn’t want to be outed before I was ready.) Screen time is fine, but anything beyond that and you have to consider how somebody with the worst intentions would use that feature.
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I’d say that even screen time is a problem when the computer is being used for support.
To put it another way, imagine you have half an hour phone time a night, and you are 29 minutes into talking to The Samaritans.
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That, sadly, will always be a problem. At least until the day people get their heads out of their collective asses. It is a hard call, since I can think of situations where it would be useful, and situations where it would be harmful. When I was young, I had friends who did court with some scary stuff on the emergent internet (sure, creepy man, I’ll meet you behind Circle K at 3am!). But then again I had friends researching emancipation, and how to bring legal proceeding against their scum, molester, parents. Like all things, it is a case by case thing, and there is no possible control against bad parents (at least until you survive childhood, or are very clever).
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kstrauser, it isn’t enabled by default. You actually have to turn it on if you have a family account.
Except it’s not enabled by default. You must turn it on. I just started a family account and those options must be turned on for you to actually use them.
That’s factually incorrect. Maybe it had something to do with our preexisting family account, but the timeline was:
- His laptop came with Windows 8. No stalker reports.
- We upgraded it to Windows 8.1. No stalker reports.
- We upgraded it to Window 10. I got a stalker report two days later.
Neither of us did anything to turn it on, but there it was. From their own FAQ:
When kids are added to a Microsoft family with a Microsoft account, any time they sign in to a Windows 10 device, their settings will be applied and their activity will be reported to the adults in their family. Adults can always turn off activity reporting or remove kids from the Microsoft family at account.microsoft.com/family.
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