It's normal for programs to reach out to the internet for purposes other than spying on the user. Microsoft is a trustworthy company that wouldn't deploy spyware within an app included in the OS.
Is this intentional devils advocacy for the sake of balancing an expected narrative? Outside of the rarely normative definition threshold as to what constitutes spyware or not, on what data / references (if any) do you base your impression on?
And how does a perception of company trustworthiness correlate with telemetry ethics that don't infringe in some way on 'basic digital human rights' (as defined by GDPR et al, say)?
Yes, because there are many people on this site who also believe a packet being sent to microsoft = spying. A lot of these people grew up with or were influenced by people who grew before the prevelance of the internet when software engineering was still immature when programs typically didn't communicate with the internet on their own.
>do you base your impression on?
My impression is based off the employees who work there who I would trust wouldn't add things like taking webcam screenshots and sending them back to Microsoft to look at.
>how does a perception of company trustworthiness correlate with telemetry ethics
Consumers and businesses will lose trust in a business if the telemetry data is not anonymized properly and put under strict privacy controls.
Overton window calculation usually starts at a minimum of two inputs without proximity requirements (except technical requirements like linguistics/ functional semantics)*
[ * Only because an opinion may appear too far removed from a given perceived spectrum-threshold for 'reasonable reasoning'.. should not necessitate collapsing the contrasting input to some purely sarcastic/humorous telos, especially when this stochastically undermines one's own chances for being afforded the inversely congruent gesture]
"Trust" is something that has scopes, and extents, and subjects and objects. It is nonsensical to ask such a question as "Guess how much people trust Microsoft". Because you have not defined any scope or categories or extent of that trust.
I trust a toddler not to run out into the street and I trust a toddler not to stick their head inside an oven. I do not trust a toddler to prepare fugu sushi, nor do I trust the toddler to weld steel girders at a height of 1000 meters.
I would trust my hypothetical wife to maintain our conversations and personal history as confidential. This is a mutual and reciprocal trust. I would trust her to prepare that fugu sushi for me, and while I would trust her skills in welding and safety precautions, I would do everything husbandly possible to ensure that she doesn't need to take a job as a welder.
I trust Microsoft to provide software to me, and I trust them to exceed their "no warranty for any purpose" sort of service disclaimers. I trust Microsoft to respond in a timely fashion to CVEs and release software updates. I trust Microsoft implicitly, because the vast majority of businesses trust Microsoft, and those cumulative business decisions have influenced my sentiment about trusting Microsoft to provide software, hardware, and services to me, over the course of 35+ years. Likewise, my somewhat paranoid and crumudgeonly father trusts Microsoft with a similar scope, although he did not trust their Aero UI interface and stubbornly simulated a Windows 95 desktop on XP...
I do not trust Microsoft to bear my children or prepare meals for me. I do not trust Microsoft to cultivate a potato farm or raise chickens. Despite these emails I've been getting which offer me $3 off every Microsoft-raised chicken, guaranteed hormone-free.
So you see that "trust" has many ways to qualify it, and some blank slate of unspecified "trust" is meaningless, as meaningless as your "Best Song of All Time" means nothing to me, because I don't know your criteria or scope.
Truth is MS had several horrendous unrelated security breaches in the last years. Despite some scolding by senators it’s business as usual, profits up. So no, MS doesn’t care about trust of the little people and maybe never did.
More like a plumber tasked with "modernizing" your bathroom, who as part of the process installs the camera surreptitiously precisely so you won't complain about compromised privacy.
In any event it looks like that bridge is no longer for sale whole-hog. There were some fairly high bidders. A whole lot more people can enjoy the opportunity to participate through timesharing now though than ever before :)
