The point is that it’s a loophole in privacy laws so they don’t have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it’s anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don’t actually look into it or understand the implications.

Ad firm money.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but my first instinct when I see stuff like this is they have a secret contract with an advertiser and are selling this information.

Like if you’re going to use Arch btw, go all the way and use actual Arch.

Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as “personal information” under privacy laws.

It’s not fucking over Microsoft, it’s prevent Microsoft from fucking us over. Microsoft is not the victim in this.

Can’t wait to have Google’s telemetry injected into my Linux apps

The gyroscope can record your speech: https://crypto.stanford.edu/gyrophone/files/gyromic.pdf

And no OS requires permissions for apps to access your motion sensors.

If you’re not allowed to modify it, it’s not open source.

Additional reminder that Google not only records your location minute by minute, they also record your motion activity through your phone’s gyroscope and know exactly what you’re doing (walking, running, biking, driving, playing sports, etc). You can view all of this in your history. It’s genuinely infuriating that they can get away with this.

You can turn it off in your settings, but as with any proprietary software you can never be sure that they’re not still doing it (why wouldn’t they? that’s just leaving profit on the table)