Windows, macOS & Linux PRIVACY compared: why do they need ALL THIS DATA?!

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#Linux #macos #windows

00:00 Intro
00:34 Sponsor: Try Proton Mail, the secure & private email service
01:48 Windows Data collection
04:33 Windows 3rd party requests
06:07 How bad is Windows?
07:05 Disable Windows data collection?
07:58 macOS data collection
09:37 Disable macOS data collection
10:34 How bad is macOS?
11:23 Linux Distributions
13:52 Sponsor: Get a PC that runs Linux perfectly
14:52 Support the channel

So if you've installed Windows 11 recently, you're familiar with the very lengthy setup process where you can uncheck a lot of toggles to try and limit what the OS collects.

What the OS will collect is the following:
- Microsoft Store Logs
- Network data
- Hardware information
- Accessory data
- Application-related data
- Event metrics

You'll also send complete words that you typed or wrote, not just statistics. You'll also send speech recognition data, and activity history, so every document you opened, website you visited...

But that's just what Microsoft tells you about. Recently, a youtuber called "The PC Security channel" analysed a completely fresh Windows install, using Wireshark, and what they found was is that Windows makes a few connections to third parties it never really told you about.

So what exactly can Microsoft do with all this data?

Well, they have more than enough to completely fingerprint your device, they can reliably tell what you use in terms of apps, and what type of content you watch, and they also basically can have a keylogger on your computer. And finally, Windows sends some data to third parties.

Fortunately, you can disable all the option stuff straight from the settings.You can go to the privacy and security options, and go into each category and disable everything there.

Apple talks a big game when it comes to privacy, but in the end, is it really true?
Out of the box, macOS sends to Apple your IP address, location, and some usage patterns, like all the apps you run, and when you run them. Other telemetry data, out of the box, includes browsing history, search history, crash data, performance and diagnostic data, location information, health information if you use that on an iPhone for example, all the info you entered in your AppleID, the device serial number, payment information, everything you bought using that Apple ID, and potentially your government ID.

Fortunately, macOS lets you disable virtually everything that's being collected. You can just head over to the Security and Privacy settings, and in analytics and improvements, uncheck everything.

Now, how about Linux? Well, Linux based operating systems, or at least desktop Linux distributions don't collect any data out of the box, with a few exceptions.

The first one is Ubuntu, who will collect telemetry data out of the box, with no personal information at all. It's just hardware data, but it could still be used to fingerprint your device. Canonical doesn't currently have any ad server that I know about, so they probably only really use this to know what their users actually use and focus their efforts on that, but if you're uncomfortable with that, you can disable it at install.

Some Ubuntu derivatives that use the same installer might also have that kind of telemetry. On top of that, you have the ability to turn some entirely optional telemetry on in KDE's settings; and GNOME also has a telemetry tool that you have to install manually.

[Linux_ASMR]

Google: if it's free, you're the product.
Microsoft: if it's not free, you're still the product.
Apple: if it's not free, you're still the product, it's just more expensive.

Linux: if it's free, it's free.

[Beryesa.]

Apart from that, offline experience gets worse year by year.

[CCoburn]

Microsoft and Apple used to turn telemetry back on every time they updated the OS. So turning off telemetry wasn’t a permanent solution.

[kote]

In fact, if you really need privacy, Linux isn't your only option - there are BSD-based systems as well as Haiku and some others. Yes, I understand that they are less friendly to most users, but it's still an option.
It's funny that the most private systems are MS-DOS, FreeDOS and so on. They're just too dumb to collect any telemetry.

[nosotrosloslobosestamosreg]

Switching off something in windows and get it deactivated are two way apart things.

[MINI_]

It's nice to see some sponsors that are actually relevant and interesting to the kind of content I watch.

[miket.]

Good lord, I thought Windows 10 was bad with telemetry. This is insane. So glad I switched to Linux Mint, best computing decision I've made in a long time. So glad modern distros are so far along and so much easier to work with, made switching a no-brainer.

[RoguishlyHandsome]

In general, on Linux, you only have to worry about what the applications do. There are most definitely applications that collect data.

[lHckrCmfr]

7:53 As any experienced Windows modder can tell you, this is not even close to enough to fully turn off Windoes 10 or 11's required telemetry. You also need to disable several other services and even scheduled tasks, many of which are hard-permission-locked and require running processes as the TrustedInstaller token - that is, a process permission mode beyond run as administrator, to succesfully modify. This requires using a specialsauce, undocumented sequence of Windows API calls, and no tools bundled with Windows offer this functionality to the user. This special ACL tier is exclusively reserved to the TrustedInstaller service out of the box, which does the actual work modifying Windows files and registry keys during Windows updates and is also the basis for the Component-Based Servicing system and the System Integrity Protection services. Using a specialized 3rd-party launcher is the only way the user can run any other processes in this effective root access state in order to modify the configurations only it has access to.

And these tweaks get automatically reverted by Windows Update after a while anyway... without notifying you, the user who clearly manually changed these settings if they're not set to their defaults, of this. So if you want any of your hard work to stick, killing Windows Update, ensuring it can't turn itself back on and effectively killing the OS's self-repair capabilities is also required.

I personally use Linux, and if I ever need Windows, I use pirated Windows Enterprise on a VM as a base, and then apply multiple sets of tracker blocklists, registry tweaks, and filesystem and Windows feature removal lists on top of that. And then use a custom script to update Windows and then re-do every single change I made to the core OS automatically.

[zodoturtle]

Debian also has optional data collection. If I remember correctly, you choose before anything is actually installed or setup. I usually allow it but not always. If I know I will be installing repeatedly, I refuse it. A repeated install is something that happens when first trying to setup a custom build for something like a server. Allowing the telemetry would actually skew their metrics because nearly all those only last a few hours at most.

[johnatkinson]

Something that wasn’t mentioned with MacOS is that the telemetry never has to be turned on, during the initial setup it asks you if you want to share Mac analytics and app analytics with Apple and third party developers. Although also counter to this if you join the MacOS beta program analytics are automatically turned on when you update to a beta version of MacOS however it’s just as easy to turn analytics back off and it only turns on the base system analytics and not any of the other analytics such as Siri improvements or share with third party developers. If you were setting up macOS in a VM then telemetry may have been turned on automatically through the setup scripts rather than macOS itself.

[duckrinium]

No Internet = No Privacy concerns!
(Maybe, idk if someone figure out data collection through USB or something)

[InGenSB]

Apple was caught few times when mac os was ignoring privacy settings (including VPN)

[wertperch]

Thank you so much for this! I'm helping a friend buy and set up a new laptop, and have shown this to them. Unsurprisingly they were horrified to learn how much data they collect and use.

Information like this is not only eye-opening but simply and well presented. You scored a new subscriber today!

[wileysneak]

one small thing to note regarding macOS is that telemetry every time you open an app can also be disabled, its a security feature similar to smartscan on windows (called gatekeeper iirc?), but i rather have it off

very sadly, you have to use the terminal to disable it

[axmyoz]

I so miss the Windows XP days! Linux FTW!

[eDoc]

I read an old article (~2002 probably) recently about telemetry Microsoft added to Windows 2000 with SP3 and the authors were naturally very upset with Microsoft. What were MS spying on back then? A list of installed applications. Nowadays if they did that we'd be shoveling praise because of how little data that is. Times have certainly changed, and in this case certainly for the worse.

[donkey]

from canonical’s perspective though, opt out is much better for telemetry, the people who go out of their way are usually fans or enthusiasts and are much different from the typical person that’s just clicks “next” a million times.

[thesaltypug]

I bought a Tuxedo laptop on your recommendation about 10 months ago. I can say that I am very pleased with the hardware, and the customization options.

However, if you are in the US, I do not recommend buying as the warranty for sending it back to be fixed (screen died within the first month k had it) is only free in Europe. It cost me about $100 USD to ship it back to Germany. They were super helpful and responded in a timely manner, but I can’t justify spending $100 on top of my warranty to send it back

As a side note, I had mine customized with a custom keyboard print and back logo, and when I sent it back for the screen repair, asked them to update the keyboard print (I had send them the wrong file, my fault not theirs). They kept the device waiting for another keyboard to come and print on that never did, and while I was willing to pay for the new keyboard, could not justify the $100 shipping on top of the $50ish(?) price.

[vaggelix]

Thank God we have you reminding us about these things. If it wasn't for these videos I would probably still be running windows because of X thing not working in linux, but now I've moved both my desktop and laptop to linux, as well as a little nuc that runs ubuntu server with nextcloud. Next stop for me will be finding a good solution for a phone that doesn't spy on me which will be 100 times harder.
No joke, keep the privacy reminders running, never feel like you're overdoing it. It's just crazy if you think about how much spying people are putting up with because they don't realise it's happening.
Again, thank you Nick for keeping this up.