Should I be worried about applications phoning home?

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Dynamic

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#181416 14-Oct-2015 21:14

Was playing the with the Guest account on the Mrs iMac earlier and needed to RDP into my office computer. The current RDP client for OS X was already installed.

Parental controls on the Guest account alerted me that the Microsoft Remote Desktop application was trying to contact telemetry.remoteapp.windowsazure.com

This sort of thing really brasses me off. I'm aware that most people blindly trade their privacy for convenience, but I'm not one of them.

Has anyone looked into this sort of thing, or is anyone actively blocking this for themselves or clients?

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chiefie

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#1405976 14-Oct-2015 21:24

Check and see if the option for "Customer experiences sharing" thing is enabled? It may or may not have that option, but that's something I do turn on for some Microsoft's applications.

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nathan

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#1407016 15-Oct-2015 05:27

there is no personally identifiable information being collected, so you're not trading your privacy for anything.

We are collecting information about how the product is being used, so the product will work better for you

Dynamic

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#1407017 15-Oct-2015 06:11

nathan: there is no personally identifiable information being collected, so you're not trading your privacy for anything.

We are collecting information about how the product is being used, so the product will work better for you

Thank you Nathan.

We all know a certain percentage of people that if you give an inch, they will take a mile. A certain percentage of corporates and governments are no different, and you don't know which ones until after the fact. For this reason I make a habit of opting out of 'customer experience programs' and the like from any software vendors.

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#1407084 15-Oct-2015 10:06

What does happen, and has happened, is that companies get caught out, then say, oops how did that happen, it was an accident . Despite paying someone
to write the software to slurp all this info, it was somehow just a mistake when they are caught out.
So you have every right to be suspicious.

In general, I would be more worried about Android apps and the permissions they take . Or data collection by google etc
Or malware thats bundled with apps, crapware thats bundled with java updates . TV's with mics & send that audio to 3rd parties for analysis .
Or google driving down your street & slurping as much data as possible (I would be arrested if I tried that)