We were spun a load of marketing disguised as listening and attention. This turned out to be exactly what Microsoft wanted which was another aggressive move against customers both business and consumer. Despite all this the noise and confusion and dubious love for the products is shining out of the arses of every non technical news source.
What did we expect?
I've left the party now. Closed my MS accounts, cancelled MSDN and AP subs, rolled out CentOS 7 on my laptop and have moved the remaining windows dependencies I have to a VM. If you don't like it, now is the time to make it known.
This is after using MS products since about 1993. No more loyalty or milking.
The software industry is moving away from the model of servitude to a vendor. Good riddance.
That said, all that data harvested and used to customize the interface for you is indeed convenient.
Don't get me wrong, I value privacy, but all things in moderation, including paranoia. I personally don't think most peopke's lives are that controversial to be so concerned about their privacy that they'll avoid the grid altogether lest some lewd fact trickle out amongs the billions of other lewd facts trickling out about everyone.
However, it will ask you first about that. And it is not actually Android, it is Google Play Services. For snitching your pictures, you have to download an extra app by yourself.
If you don't like that and you don't want to say 'no' when asked, use Cyanogen without Gapps. That way, you'll get non-spying vanilla Android. (That means without Play Store too).
Use it with a throwaway Google account to download apps from the Play Store, then use adb to install them on your device. This works fine for apps which don't rely on specific Google libraries or services being installed on your device.
I'm going to ditch Android for a free-er OS when I have the money, although if possible I want to get a [Fairphone](https://www.fairphone.com/) (tl;dr 1. no shady business practices/exploitation, 2. modular with replaceable parts (bonus points for having an integrated protective case), 3. Fairphone V2 will be 100% Free Software (or at least, the firmware/drivers will be), 4. costs $800 as a result).
I'm actually really interested in seeing the Fairphone be a thing.
I'm hopeful that Firefox OS and perhaps Ubuntu/Full GNU/Linux on phones will help. Canonical hasn't got a perfect record when it comes to privacy or openness -- but if they manage to invest the resource to develop a truly open stack that works on real hardware, I expect people to make other distributions that do pretty much whatever one wants.
Actually I installed it to test our desktop windows product against it as well as our web application in Edge.
This was a decider for us: do we move it to Windows Runtime or move it to Qt/JavaFX, to the web or something else?
We're evaluating Qt and JavaFX going forwards.
As I said I've been using Windows since 1993 as my primary operating system. I've used Unix (Solaris, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) over the years but never in a desktop capacity.
Also one of our clients, a big financial company has rolled out RHEL6 as a desktop platform instead of windows 8/10. They are not trend-setters either.
You bitching that your job requires you to test a product against Windows in a VM is not the same as Microsoft holding you personally hostage to give up all your personal information, however you try to spin it.
Are you also free not to have your private information (personal data, trade secrets, whatever it might be) given to Microsoft by others you interact with who do use Microsoft's new operating systems?
Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but I think "no one wanted it" is a stretch.
I have a 3 desktops, 2 laptops, a NAS and 2 servers and have solved the problems transparently without any cloud services.
How so? Billions of people choose to pay for services/software with their privacy these days. Microsoft isn't to blame for that. If anything they were really late to the party
