Microsoft has Copilot Plus PCs loaded with AI, and rumors are that Apple is all in on AI, too, but if you don't want AI in everything you do, there is another option: Linux.
I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS’s stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There’s no way the data they’re spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they’d lose in sales.
…Then again, we’ve seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before… I guess we’ll see.
“Oopsie, we didn’t mean to leave the libraries in like that, and then for that update to switch ON the collection of all data after people stopped paying attention to it, and then after a lot of data has been collected for that still additional update to cause all that data to be sent back to our home servers…”
And perhaps it would not even be a lie - one malicious actor, working inside the company, might be able to sneak it in without the higher-ups knowing about it. Or arguably worst of all, not even realize themselves that they did it, until after-the-fact.
When working with something dangerous - e.g. explosives, or heavy like a car - it behooves us to treat it with special care. The fact that this data collection option now exists already warrants greater care in using Microsoft products in terms of security. Except, just how much do people care?
I could also see another alternative moving forward: the DoS simply freezes their Windows versions at the last version that did not include the data collection capability, and then never updates again. As the first years and then decades roll by, and they are using the equivalent of Windows 7, then XP, then 95, then 3.1, they simply lose out on having “computers”. Possibly here I’ve gone too far into the doom-and-gloom, b/c while it’s possible it’s not terribly plausible, though it illustrates how Microsoft is not committed to the safety of a national government, but rather instead solely their own profits - and short-term ones at that.
I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS’s stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There’s no way the data they’re spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they’d lose in sales.
…Then again, we’ve seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before… I guess we’ll see.
“Oopsie, we didn’t mean to leave the libraries in like that, and then for that update to switch ON the collection of all data after people stopped paying attention to it, and then after a lot of data has been collected for that still additional update to cause all that data to be sent back to our home servers…”
And perhaps it would not even be a lie - one malicious actor, working inside the company, might be able to sneak it in without the higher-ups knowing about it. Or arguably worst of all, not even realize themselves that they did it, until after-the-fact.
When working with something dangerous - e.g. explosives, or heavy like a car - it behooves us to treat it with special care. The fact that this data collection option now exists already warrants greater care in using Microsoft products in terms of security. Except, just how much do people care?
I could also see another alternative moving forward: the DoS simply freezes their Windows versions at the last version that did not include the data collection capability, and then never updates again. As the first years and then decades roll by, and they are using the equivalent of Windows 7, then XP, then 95, then 3.1, they simply lose out on having “computers”. Possibly here I’ve gone too far into the doom-and-gloom, b/c while it’s possible it’s not terribly plausible, though it illustrates how Microsoft is not committed to the safety of a national government, but rather instead solely their own profits - and short-term ones at that.