I know this will sound paranoid as fuck, but I've really been thinking about Microsoft lately. Like, they're pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not. The fact that it even made it past the concept stage tells me that no one at Microsoft gives a single fuck about their users anymore. The final shreds of any trust I had in them as a company are gone and I've started thinking of them as an adversary.
Today I was considering Teams in particular. My company has been using it for maybe six years. When our email provider went teats up, I did some research and realized we had Microsoft cloud stuff included in our Action Pack subscription. We started using their email, and about the same time we started using Teams.
Teams offers EEE but only on Teams Premium, which we don't pay extra for. Microsoft has access to every message and chat. They could be saving transcripts and voice calls. They might have accumulated billions of hours of voice data by now.
What could they do with all this data?
- Sell to LEO
- Commit corporate espionage
- Gather government secrets
- Use for AI training
Something else just occurred to me. I did research a while back on the software stacks that big tech companies use. Not one uses IIS.
I've been a Windows developer for thirty years. I used to like Microsoft. I looked forward to new versions of Windows and Visual Studio. Now I feel like they've lured us all in slowly until we put our throats in their jaws. Fucking mental.
Talk me down, if you can.
Dude, think of what you're saying. Recall is baked into the OS. In this day and age there's a huge chance, almost a certainty, that the only options are to "opt-in" and know all your interactions are being funneled and mined, or don't, and you don't know, but it's still happening.
How are you going to audit it? Most Windows users have no idea how to audit what happens in their network, most humans don't have a way to look into what MS software is doing because there's no access to the code.
Yeah, I'll keep giving them the credit they deserve, which is being sure thay are doing whatever they want whether you know it or not.
Corporations will notice extra data over their network, etc and act as an unofficial audit. That's also the way problems with updates generally get found.
Corporations and nerds will most likely find out, but as I said, regular users? Highly unlikely.