Microsoft Finally Reveals What Data Windows 10 Collects From Your PC

Wednesday, April 05, 2017 Mohit Kumar



Since the launch of Windows 10, there has been widespread concern about its data collection practices, mostly because Microsoft has been very secretive about the telemetry data it collects.

Now, this is going to be changed, as Microsoft wants to be more transparent on its diagnostics data collection practices.

Till now there are three options (Basic, Enhanced, Full) for Windows 10 users to select from under its diagnostics data collection section, with no option for users to opt out of sending their data to Microsoft.

Also, the company has never said precisely what data it collects behind these options, which raised huge privacy concerns among privacy-conscious users.



But now for the first time, Microsoft has revealed what data Windows 10 is collecting from your computer with the release of the Windows 10 Creators Update, bringing an end to nearly two years of its mysterious data collection practices.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, which will be available from April 11 for users to download for free, comes with a revamped Privacy settings section.

During the process of upgrading to the Creators Update, you will be displayed a new Privacy Settings screen that will ask you to toggle the following features:


Location – Allow Windows and apps to request your location and share that data with Microsoft.
Speech Recognition – Allow Cortana and Windows Store apps to recognize your voice and send that data to Microsoft to improve speech recognition.
Tailored experiences with diagnostic data – Allow Microsoft to use diagnostic data from your computer to offer tips and recommendations.
Relevant ads – Allow apps to use advertising IDs to show ads more interesting to you based on your app usage.
What's more? On Wednesday, Microsoft published a massive list of diagnostics data – both the Basic and Full levels of diagnostics – on its TechNet site, showing what data gets collected.




Basic – The Basic level collects a limited set of data that is critical for understanding the device and its configuration. This data includes basic device information, quality-related information, app compatibility, and Windows Store.
Full – The Full level collects data for the following nine categories: common data; software setup and inventory data; product and service usage data; browsing, search and query data; content consumption data; linking, typing, and speech utterance data; and licensing and purchase data.
Windows chief Terry Myerson said in a blog post published Wednesday that Microsoft hoped the transparency would allow users to make "more informed choices" as the company starts rolling out its new Creators update to the operating system.

This more transparency in gathering diagnostic data after two years of the Windows 10 release is likely Microsoft's response to European Union regulators that's publicly pressuring the company about its privacy practices for the past year.

In February, European Union regulators said they're still unsatisfied with the privacy changes announced by Microsoft and seeking further clarification from the company.

Marisa Rogers, the privacy officer of the Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group, said that the company is planning to "share more information about how [it] will ensure Windows 10 is compliant with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation."

Microsoft opens up Cortana to developers and manufacturers with Skills Kit and Devices SDK

By tech2 News Staff /  14 Dec 2016 , 17:39

Microsoft is extending the capabilities of its artificial intelligence assistant, Cortana to new devices and developers. Microsoft announced a Skills Kit and a Cortana Devices SDK. The Skills Kit is to add capabilities to Cortana across the platforms that it is available on, including Windows, iOS and Android. The devices SDK will allow Cortana integration into a new generation of smart devices. Developers and Device Manufacturers can sign up to get access and updates as Microsoft moves the capabilities out of private preview.

The Cortana Skills Kit allows users to integrate capabilities with Cortana using chatbots created for the Microsoft Bot Framework. The web services offered by companies can be published as a skill on Cortana through the Skills Kit. There is also a facility to re-purpose existing code for Amazon’s Alexa. Early partners have already integrated skills into Cortana. These include Knowmail that uses Cortana to prioritise emails based on habits of individual users, Capital One that facilitates money management through a voice interface, Expedia that allows users to book hotels, and TalkLocal that can connect to local services based on user requests.

The voice based services can potentially be used by the premium smart speaker by Harman Kardon with Cortana Integration, that is expected to be available in 2017.

The Cortana Devices SDK will allow for third party Original Equipment Manufacturers and Original Device Manufacturers to integrate Cortana into their product offerings. The Devices SDK is platform and device independent, designed to make Cortana unbound, and work on any platform or device. Microsoft is already working with many industries across various hardware categories. One exciting tease from Microsoft is that it is working to get Cortana on at least one connected car. Cortana is included in the Core edition of the Windows IoT platform, which allows the assistant to be embedded in IoT devices.

The Cortana Skills Kit and the Cortana Devices SDK are in private preview as of now, and will be available more broadly in 2017.

Google Pixel: Company wants to make voice-powered Assistant better than rivals Siri and Cortana

  30 Oct 2016 , 10:34

About six months ago, people working on hardware and the voice-activated Google Assistant for the Pixel phone started sitting next to each other at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters, hammering out minute details of its first phone.

The new seating arrangement illustrated a much larger shift underway at Alphabet Inc’s Google, which crashed Apple Inc’s smartphone revolution eight years ago by giving away its Android software and letting handset makers do the rest.

Google software now runs on 85 percent of the world’s smartphones, but as voice control threatens to replace touch as the primary means of using a hand-held device, the company is experimenting with a different approach – more akin to Apple’s tight integration of hardware and software.

The Pixel’s hardware and Assistant teams gather for happy hour every Friday and have already received a prototype for the camera on next year’s phone, said Brian Rakowski, vice president of product for Google’s Android operating system.

Their ambition: to make the company’s voice-powered digital assistant better than rivals such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft Corp’s Cortana.

“We really wanted the Assistant on the phone to feel like a natural extension of the ways you ask Google for information,” Rakowski said in an interview.

LEAF FROM APPLE’S BOOK

The fusion of hardware and software is key to that goal. Certain specifications are crucial for a high-performing assistant, such as a well-placed microphone and a powerful processor to crunch reams of data.

Creating an app isn’t enough; that requires a few clicks for users to get to it.

The hardware and software teams worked closely on details such as the graphics that appear when users call up the assistant, settling on a flurry of colorful dots, which Rakowski called a “whimsical touch to give a little bit of life to the home button.”

The Assistant is always at the ready on the Pixel phone and can be summoned by pressing the home button or saying the words “OK Google.”

By integrating the Assistant into the Pixel, Google “doesn’t have to do negotiations with another handset maker – they can make it as tight as they want,” said Charles Jolley, chief executive of Ozlo, which offers a digital assistant by the same name.

To make sure users get the best possible experience, the Assistant will live only on Google products such as the Pixel, at least for now.

In the long term, however, it is unclear whether Google will keep it that way, or return to its original phone strategy and try to push the product out to the millions of smartphones running on other manufacturers’ Android phones, at the risk of offering a slightly lower-quality experience.

Rakowski said making sure the Assistant works well on other phones would require a close level of integration with handset makers, beyond the typical work that happens on the Android operating system.

“We want all these features of the Assistant to work well and work quickly and be nicely integrated so it gives the right idea of what the Assistant can do,” he said “We don’t want it to feel limited or bolted on in any way.”

He admits it could be challenging to execute the Assistant on some current Android phones.

“You can’t do some of the always-on ‘OK Google’ detection on some phones because they don’t include the right hardware to do that,” he

Samsung buys Viv Labs, whose team originally created Siri

By Tim Schiesser on October 6, 2016, 6:15 AM


Samsung wants its own personal assistant to compete with Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa and Cortana, so they've bought a company that designs them. As confirmed in a Medium post, AI assistant startup Viv Labs has been acquired by Samsung for an undisclosed price.

The Viv Labs team, namely Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Chris Brigham, is best known for designing and then selling its previous assistant technology, Siri, to Apple. The team gradually left Apple after the acquisition of Siri in 2012 and formed Viv Labs, who have been working on a next-gen assistant called Viv for several years.

Under Samsung, Viv Labs will operate as an independent company and will continue to work on their virtual assistant. Viv is reportedly a more powerful version of Siri with better integration of data and services, with the ability to understand more complex queries and remember important context from previous questions.

Viv Labs will provide services to Samsung and their various platforms, but it's not clear whether the assistant or its technology will be available outside Samsung's ecosystem. However it does give Samsung a tool to compete with heavyweights from Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and even Facebook, who are all developing their own AI assistant products.

According to Kittlaus, Samsung are setting their signs on "on becoming a major player in software and services, and specifically AI." The fact that Samsung ships more than 500 million devices a year was a tasty proposition for Viv Labs, whose technology could be seen in Galaxy devices and Samsung televisions as soon as next year.

Many Android 7.1 Nougat features, including Google Assistant, are exclusive to the Pixel

By Rob Thubron on October 6, 2016, 8:30 AM



Google finally unveiled its long-rumored Pixel smartphones earlier this week. They will be the first to launch with Android 7.1 Nougat, but many of the Pixels’ best features, such as the new Google Assistant, won’t appear on other Android devices, including Google’s own Nexus series, when the OS arrives.

An Android 7.1 Nougat changelog leaked to Android Police shows which new features will appear in the upcoming operating system, as well as those that are Pixel-only. Google confirmed that the information is accurate is to TechCrunch.

The absence of the AI-powered helper will come as disappointment to those who expected to see the Siri/Cortana/Alexa rival on every handset receiving Android 7.1 Nougat. Google Assistant is essentially a more advanced version of Google Now, able to engage in two-way conversations with users, perform complex tasks, and learn and recall personal information from previous conversations for context.

Other Pixel exclusives include the free, unlimited photo and video (in their original quality) cloud backup service; the smart storage feature, which automatically removes old, backed up images/videos when the storage is full; and the Pixel Camera and Launcher apps. 24-hour phone/chat support and screen-share functionality will also be limited to the Pixel phones.

There are some interesting new features coming to all devices that receive Android 7.1, though. There’s the Night Light blue filter, which changes the color temperature of a display at night. A Daydream VR mode is also on its way, along with support for sliding down on the fingerprint sensor to open the notification bar.

Google did say that its Assistant would eventually be arriving on other Android devices, just don’t expect it soon. Ultimately, the company will likely replace Google Now with its more advanced version of the assistant.

"Our goal is to make the Google Assistant widely available to users, and we’ll continue to launch new surfaces over the course of the next year," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The developer preview of Android 7.1 arrives later this month. Google hasn’t said when it will come to phones other than the Pixel.

We want to democratise artificial intelligence, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Artificial Intelligence is the current buzzword and every major tech giant including Google, Facebook, IBM and others are investing heavily in it. At its annual IT conference Ignite, in Atlanta, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also spoke at length about AI and how Microsoft is focussing on this field and how it plans to leverage it in the future.

Nadella said that Microsoft is working towards democratising AI. Taking a slight dig at Google and IBM, Nadella said, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.” This was clearly in reference to the news reports of how Google’s AI has been effective in defeating humans in Chinese board game Go as well as IBM’s Watson defeating humans at Jeopardy.

“We are pursuing AI, so that we can empower every person and every institution that people build with tools of AI. So that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and our economy. That’s the pursuit,” said Nadella.

According to Nadella, Microsoft is working towards analysing mountains of data which is produced by consumers or businesses and then making sense of it by presenting it in a legible way to people. Microsoft is approaching AI via what it calls as ‘four core pillars. Namely agents, applications, services and infrastructure. And needless to say each of these pillars is associated with a related Microsoft service.

Cortana, the digital assistant of Microsoft will be an agent, which will be a new organising layer which will sit across all applications you will use in your life. Microsoft Office and Dynamics software can function as applications. According to Nadella, Microsoft Dynamics is capable of sifting through third party apps such as LinkedIn to point out where changes are made on this app.

Cortana being open to third party developers to help them use it to build their own apps is an example of services said Nadella.

Nadella also mentioned that Microsoft is using custom computer chips to help crunch information quicker and better manage traffic in data centres.

Deep learning is a major component of all the products and services making use of AI. This lets organisations feed large amounts of data in to neural networks, which mimic the human brain in a way to understand links between information and data sets. Google and Facebook have been using deep learning for things such as improving search results, image recognition, speech translation and so on.

Microsoft Extends Windows 10 Features With Desktop Bridge

Microsoft announced that it has completed work on its Desktop Bridge, which is a software utility designed to port applications from older versions of Windows to Windows 10. Although the Desktop Bridge has several important features, it may negatively impact software performance overall.

The Desktop Bridge And UWP

Although porting software to Windows 10’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a key feature of the Desktop Bridge, it actually contains several other tools to aid software developers. For the first time, you will be able to use the Linux Bash command on Windows. Software developers will also be able to share code with each other using a tool called Xamarin.

Of course, the real star of the show is Project Centennial, which is the desktop app converter. It can analyze older Windows applications and port them to the UWP. The tool also allows you to configure the software to work with Cortana, Windows Live tiles, and other Windows 10 features.

“Working in parallel with Microsoft, we are making it easy for our customers to transition their existing InstallShield MSI projects to build Universal Windows Platform and Windows Server App packages.  InstallShield is the only product that enables developers to test their apps for compatibility with the Desktop Bridge and WSAs – saving countless hours of time, effort and investigative work,” said  Maureen Polte, Vice President of Product Management at Flexera Software.

Once the software has been ported to the UWP, it can be uploaded to the Windows Store and used on essentially any device that supports the UWP. This technically includes the Xbox One, but it is likely that developers will need to make additional changes to their software in order to be fully functional on the game console.

Although the new tool set will be helpful to software developers, this won’t change much if you don’t dabble in code. Microsoft announced that several programs including Evernote, Arduino IDE, doubleTwist, PhotoScape, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Virtual Robotics Kit, Relab, SQL Pro, Voya Media, Predicted Desire, and korAccount have been ported using the Desktop Bridge and will launch with official Windows 10 support within the next few days.

Most of these programs already work fine on Windows 10, though. We briefly tested PhotoScape, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Voya Media, and KorAccount using the Windows 7/8.1 installation packages and were able to get all of them except Voya Media to work without issue on a Windows 10 notebook. Some programs like Voya Media have now been ported with the Desktop Bridge, but it is unlikely you will notice many new apps on PCs running Windows 10.

Should We Really Rely On The UWP?

Although it is always helpful to have an abundance of applications available, and the Desktop Bridge will certainly be an asset to software developers and end-users alike, we should keep in mind that use of this software could negatively impact our computing experience in some cases..

Software that is carefully optimized for a single device is essentially always able to operate more efficiently. When software is not optimized well, it can cripple performance. Anyone that has purchased a new PC game in the last several years knows this all too well.

By using a semi-automated process to port software to a platform designed for multiple hardware configurations, there is a significant likelihood that we’ll see instances of degraded software performance. It is hard to judge how much this may affect performance, but it is still something to bear in mind as the UWP evolves.

The Desktop Bridge is available now for Microsoft’s Windows 10 from the Windows Store