"Android apps, forced Microsoft accounts, telemetry, oh my!"

Given how curmudgeonly my immediate reaction was to this week's Windows 11 announcement, I was beginning to wonder if I'm just being far too cynical about all of this. Nobody else was making that much noise about the six-year-old telemetry and data collection that was bundled into Windows 10 (and later back-ported to Windows 7). The biggest substantive criticism of W11 seemed to revolve around its hardware requirements (especially TPM 2.0); the next-biggest criticism was about the removal of the ability to reposition the taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the one of sides.

Apparently, though, other people just needed a little time to catch up; por ejemplo, Jez Corden, at Windows Central:

In our heavily connected, heavily surveilled world, anxiety about government and big tech overreach is at a fever pitch. And Microsoft has increasingly fallen on the wrong side of this argument.

At the Windows 11 event yesterday, Microsoft had an opportunity to meet some of these concerns, founded or not. Yet, it chose not to. [...]

In Microsoft's Windows 11 blog post, the word "privacy" doesn't appear once in the copy, which doesn't exactly bode well for its messaging. Windows 11 will force users to use a Microsoft Account in its free Home Edition, which already speaks of a business model where your data is the monetization engine. Even if you're using the world's best VPN, it's not exactly going to protect your data from going directly to Microsoft if you're signed in. [...]

Microsoft is also enlisting another doubted tech giant, Amazon, to bring Android apps to Windows 11. Amazon is under heavy scrutiny already for the way it treats its workers among other things, but combining this with Android adds another layer of concern. Android is oft-painted as an insecure, privacy-apathetic platform. True or not, the prospect of an Amazon-fronted Android subsystem in Windows 11 compounds data fears.

Given how many people use Android, I'm not at all convinced that the Android OS itself is a security concern. Google is not Facebook; they may want to collect a lot of data about their users for use as advertising algorithm fuel, but Google also allow those same users to opt out pretty easily, and remind their users to check and update those privacy setting regularly, things which Facebook does not appear to have any intention of doing. Hell, I'd be much less concerned about Android apps on W11 if you could link the Google Play store, as well, rather than just Amazon's inferior version.

Microsoft's other data harvesting practices are, in my opinion, far more problematic. And while Microsoft eventually did implement a Google-style privacy dashboard of their own, they only did so because of regulatory pressure in Europe, and their dashboard still doesn't allow Windows users to turn off the data collection completely, the way Google's users can. 

Quoting from Corden again:

A large amount of the features and apps in Windows 10 already dial home to Redmond, feeding diagnostics data and other information to the company. I've written before about how telemetry over old-fashioned QA has sucked the human touch out of Microsoft's design practices, but that's another matter entirely. Is Microsoft's harvesting of this data justified? Is it really necessary? Does it enhance the end-user experience? If so, how? Otherwise, it just feels like more bloat that can be used for marketing purposes.

And that, really, is the point. During a presentation in which no less a figure than Satya Nadella himself spent several minutes talking about the importance of enabling consumer choice, the single biggest choice that Windows users have been asking Microsoft to enable, for years now, wasn't mentioned even once.

Oh, and for users that want to run Android apps on W11 without having to go through Amazon's app store to do it? It turns out W11 actually does have a feature which will enable exactly that, and which Microsoft also failed to mention during their presentation. It makes one wonder what backroom deal was done between Amazon and Microsoft so that MSFT would stovepipe Windows users directly to Amazon, instead of actually telling them about the other consumer choices that are already enabled by "The Product."

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm just being far too cynical about all of this...