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.
I’m sorry. It came out years ago that Win 10 keylogged and told home all about it (justified as to improve our predictive typing software ) even though there were no promises in the ToS to limit its spyware use, I screamed about how the fucking sky is fucking falling, and now Windows 10 is in bunches of US businesses, and more than a few outside the US. It even says in the EULA MS will snitch on you to law enforcement about anything it feels like.
So yeah, all the people who have legitimate businesses that have real secrets (and break laws as a matter of course) have all wittingly chosen to give Microsoft all the biographical leverage MS needs to take over the world. (Some companies actually got their tech teams to defang the Win10 spyware. But more didn’t than did.)
Now I’m one of those 1960s hippies who screamed about the rising police state in the US to whom no one listened. Another Cassandra crying like a bainsidhe into the wind.