My first post on this blog led with “you should happen to the computer; the computer shouldn’t happen to you.” The rest of the post recounted some of my gripes about Windows and macOS, especially when it comes to Microsoft insisting that Windows needs to always be connected to the internet. (A connection the operating system then abuses to share a bunch of data about pretty much everything a Windows user does with Microsoft.) But I had no idea how difficult it is to make Windows stop “phoning home.”
Tony Robinson does. I’ve watched with interest over the last few days as he’s struggled to get Windows to stop attempting to connect to Microsoft’s servers–and “struggled” might be an understatement. It took someone who really knows his shit–Robinson is a senior security researcher at Proofpoint–over a week to figure out how to sever the connection between Windows and Microsoft. The saga started before Feb. 16 and lasted until Feb. 21. (And that’s assuming other problems don’t pop up.)
Check out Robinson’s summary for more information about how to get Windows 11 to (mostly) stop phoning home. It’s not something most Windows users will be able to do themselves, however, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft puts an end to some of these workarounds in the future. Robinson lamented:
the only thing I’m going to say is that this was a week of my time that I’ll never get back and that I’m seriously irritated that its this hard to get Microsoft to respect user choice.
I suspect it would be similarly difficult to get macOS to stop reaching out to Apple’s servers with seemingly every keystroke. Seriously: Install LuLu and see how often it notifies you of outgoing connections to Apple’s network. The day I installed it, I must have spent hours trying to figure out what each connection was supposed to achieve, and that was several years ago. I doubt it’s gotten better since then, especially since Apple too is looking to build “AI” into more of its products.
There are some benefits to this pretty-much-always-connected design Microsoft and Apple have settled on. It makes it easier for them to push updates to their users, for example, which can help mitigate the impact of known vulnerabilities. What bothers me is that it’s so fucking hard to figure out what information these operating systems are sharing, with whom, and for what purpose–and, apparently, even harder still to prevent them from sharing that data at all. Yet I’m supposed to believe they run on “my” computer? Sure.