Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: OT - Being Forced to Upgrade to Win 8.1

Latexluv opened this issue on Oct 12, 2014 · 96 posts


moriador posted Tue, 16 December 2014 at 7:37 AM

I don't use a Mac. So, I'm still curious. Not because I can't do the research, but I want to know if you can. It would seem that you can't. Or won't. Because you won't like what you find -- which is that MS has one of the strictest privacy policies of all software vendors, and the most to lose from a big scandal.

So. MS knows the IP of this machine, which gives geolocation information. Something every single website I've ever visited knows (or can know). MS knows what OS I use. So does every website I've ever visited. MS knows the validation serial number of the OS. So what? They don't know who bought the machine I'm using. MS knows a few more odd pieces of technical data about my machine, not unlike what's in my signature in these forums. What else? Not much. And absolutely nothing that points towards MY IDENTITY. Hell, Renderosity knows far more about me than Microsoft. I quake in fear of the Rendo marketplace gods!

Google might know a lot more about me -- if it actually knew who I was. What it knows is that a whole bunch of activity comes from a particular IP in my city. Wow. Good for Google. Whatta they gonna do with all that data? Well, they might change the UI of their search engine. They might improve their algorithms. Hell, they might even decide that nothing on YouTube is worth keeping except audio books of Herodotus and videos of kittens falling asleep.

What exactly is anyone going to do with all that data?

You're not afraid of GCHQ, but you are afraid of Microsoft. Sorry. Doesn't compute. 


PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.