Microsoft has been accused many times of spying on its customers with Windows 10. The reason or pretext according to the company is that the operating system collects certain data needed to diagnose errors to help improve reliability.
But that seems like a mistake in the face of a new patent filed by Microsoft. If we ever see this technology in mass production, we'll have to forget what privacy means.
The patent filed by the company is called “Query formulation via task continuum,” and it essentially describes a technology that tracks everything users do on their computers, including the time they spend working with third-party applications.
As MSPU reports , this is for the good of users, as Microsoft is trying to connect third-party apps with its own services in order to provide a better search experience.
How it works:
Basically, Microsoft is saying that by tracking what users are doing on their computers, like creating a document, the search engine can always be prepared to show better search results. For example, if you're writing a book, Bing will know what you're interested in (from what you're writing) and can instantly provide results that are relevant to your work.
Microsoft goes into more detail in the patent description, explaining that the new feature will be able to collect all kinds of "signals," including text the user sees, recognize text from images, the audio from a song playing, and more.
“The operating system monitors all text data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user’s intent (from context). The inferred user intent is sent as a message to search providers to improve search result rankings, providing an improved user experience as queries and results will be more relevant to what the user is trying to achieve,” Microsoft says.
Redmond emphasizes that users will always have full control over the operation and no data leaves the computer without their consent.
Of course we all know how these things work and how easy it is to violate our privacy.
At the moment, Microsoft doesn't seem ready to make this feature available in Windows, but if it does at some point, we'll finally be able to say goodbye to our privacy.
/long live Linux
