[dayglored]

Whoopsie.

[dayglored]

Microsoft Office personal "telemetry" violates GDPR ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".

[LegendHasIt]

Gee, Golly, if only someone had warned us that our computers could be spying on us.

I suppose someday, it will come out that Linux does it too....
But for now, I’ll try to feel relieved that I switched over to it a few years ago.

[kiryandil]

I quit using Microcrap’s Office applications YEARS ago.

[TChad]

It amazes me that Microsoft has chosen to flush so much goodwill down the toilet.

[FrankR]

We used to have Lotus AmiPro, and I liked it a lot better than Word.

It seems to have disappeared, and I’m still using an old, old,version of Word now.

I refuse to sign up for the “subscription” Word. I’ll find another substitute when the time comes.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

The EU GDPR rules are a nightmare - so vaguely written that finding ways to comply with them could take months or years of application re-writes and, of course, accompanied by massive penalties for non-compliance.

The Chinese have a similar swamp of regulations coming up, too.

[zeugma]

And in one piece of advice that will have Redmond execs jumping up and down in fury, the researchers recommend that sysadmins "consider conducting a pilot with alternative software" – something that "would be in line with the Dutch government policy to promote open standards and open source software."

Yup. That's what it will take. These days, unless you have very complex excel docs that make heavy use of microsoft-specific macros and such, there is really no reason you couldn't change to something like LibreOffice. The vast majority of folks don't use more than 10% of the features of any of these 'office' programs.

The open document format of LibreOffice is superior in any case, as it is fully documented. The worst document format ever IMO is microsoft's "xml" variation. It is horrific with nasty undocumented data blobs.

[9YearLurker]

Good. Microsoft has somehow been cast as the relatively good guy compared to Facebook, Google and Twitter. But not just Office but even more Windows 10 is a massive intrusion on privacy.