Fwd: [ PRIVACY Forum ] Windows 10 will share your Wi-Fi key with

Tue Jul 7 09:41:47 UTC 2015

"Sean Donelan" <sean at donelan.com> writes:
> On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, Joe Greco wrote:
> > Anyways, if you look on the first page of "Customize settings", yes
> > there's an option for "Automatically connect to networks shared by my
> > contacts" and it CAN be turned off, but it defaults to on.
> 
> Defaults matter.  Every configuration parameter has a default setting, 
> whether intentional or not.

Well of course defaults matter.  We work in an industry where the
defaults supplied by most tech companies for the average user are quite
depressing to me.  People want easy and many don't bother to understand
or (even worse) care about privacy.  Just look at web advertising and
tracking.  As bad as that is on the general Internet, even I was a bit
shocked to find yesterday while training NoScript on a new VM that a
certain wireless carrier's customer portal was reaching out to maybe as
many as twenty different ad and tracking networks, including Bing, 
Yahoo, and Google, in order for you to log in and pay your bill.

http://www.sol.net/tmp/nanog/mytmobile-login.jpg

This stuff is frickin' pervasive.  The default is "track the hell out
of everyone" and "share everything you can."  

I remember first seeing the Windows 10 "share networks to contacts" and
trying to imagine that it meant anything other than wifi access creds.
That's part of the problem.  They don't even tell you what the words
are actually saying, or why it matters one way or another.  For those
on this list, that may not be a problem, but my 80 year old mom isn't
going to have a clue.

Bacon Zombie <baconzombie at gmail.com> writes:
> This is on by default in the beta like all the reporting in MS.
>
> Will probably be either a prompt in the RTM version.

Sure.  A prompt that defaults to on, on a screen that most people
probably bypass, because the new thing is to make tech easy, and
bogging them down with a bunch of questions that only computer geeks
and privacy wonks and network gearheads care about (or even understand)
is anti-user.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.