Headline is misleading. They do have consent. This is one reason I don't allow automatic updates.
MS statement: "For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade."
Second, even if they did consent to automatic updates, that obviously applies to updating the current product they purchased. Upgrading to a different model is obviously not what people expect. Most people expect that their car will receive necessary updates (recall notices), which obviously doesn't include exchanging the car for next years model without some sort of additional contract.
Besides, it's obvious why Microsoft is forcing out the download - they are using download numbers in their their marketing strategy. (i.e. the astroturf headlines claiming "{N} Million User Download Windows 10 in {TimePeriod}")
First, I'm confused about how this is considered a default setting. Anytime I've installed a version of Windows that has automatic updates it asks me during the install what my update preferences are. Just because a select menu has something as the default doesn't mean that I'm not consenting when I review that select menu and hit "Next" in the installer.
Secondly, this is a commercial product that I am choosing to install. By necessity it has a lot of configuration options that are set to various different values. Is it not implied consent that when I install an operating system that I am agreeing/consenting to all of the different default settings?
Your Win7 screenshot shows just a nice green shield next to the preselected default setting, and a scary red "X" next to the one that would prevent Win10 from being downloaded. The 3rd option also says that you will be vulnerable if you select it.
Finally, nothing on those screens says anything about automatically downloading a different OS. There's zero consent to that.
It's not a different OS it is an upgrade, and the scary red "X" is valid and not a scare tactic. I deal with people on a regular basis that are still running XP, which leaves them vulnerable to attack and infection.
In the always connected world that we live in, automatic updates are a very necessary fact of life.
That is true in a sense. But I think this is very from from how the average user sees things, and the way the average user sees things is crucial here since we are talking about user consent. In the mind of the average user, there is a very large difference between KB 1498028 and Windows 10.
This also glosses over the rather enormous difference in sheer size between this "update" and others, which is, as far as I understand it, the focus of people's concern here.
What consent is that if people don't understands the facts, implications, and future consequences of the action. Worse, updates has an common perception to be small security fixes.
Should we call it uninformed consent? tricked consent? non-binding consent?
If we want to use legal terms, is 6G download ordinarily and reasonably to be contemplated by the user?
Unfortunately I think in the computing world the idea that it is even possible to understand the facts, implications and consequences of an action is increasingly a fantasy.
It's hard enough for the seasoned geek to acquire enough knowledge actually understand how a computer works. But then you throw in cloud services where the source of truth becomes blurred, and the services are constantly changing under your nose. Even assuming the best of intentions from companies building these systems, it's impossible to keep up.
Well take your pick, then. You can have automatic updates and get security/functionality updates, or you can not and not, and an OS upgrade can be reasonably considered under the aegis of system updates.
Y'all have been campaigning for users to be automatically updated, often whether they want to or not (c.f. Windows rebooting overnight causing the loss of any open documents) because having them not be makes everyone demonstrably less safe and users will never update if you ask them to.
You and a lot of other people in this thread seem to be going out of your way to conflate automatic updates (such as security patches), and upgrading to another product (such as Win [78] -> Win 10).
You're trying to tie the concepts together to create false dichotomy, which you use as a rhetorical tactic. This usually involves specifically ignoring the people you're replying to and many other posts in the thread that already answered this subject.
The "different product" differentiation is more a marketing one than an objective one. The notable changes between 8/10 are a lot less than, say. 3.1/95.
I think this is a stretch. While they may have users' consent in the broadest, legalistic sense, I think it is doubtful that users who chose to receive automatic updates would expect that this would extend to a 6 GB download of an entirely new version of the OS. This is not your usual Windows update, and is probably not the sort of thing users have in mind when they opt in for automatic updates.
OS X keeps harassing me to update to the latest version because I have automatic updates on and haven't turned the notifications off, but it hasn't gone and downloaded the new OS pre-emptively without my consent.
Instead, you just get a pop up, daily, to upgrade to Yosemite. There's no way to remove it, hiding the update in the app store does nothing and there's no way, even after months of clicking "Close" to have it figure out that "No, I don't want to upgrade to it."
Is that a better design? Especially considering Apple routinely automatically downloads updates that are also in the gigabyte range.
Not saying I agree with MS's decision of what constitutes an update, but if a user grants a company the option to automatically download and install stuff to their computer, they're kindof writing a blank check.
If I pay Microsoft for an OS, I expect them to use good judgment when applying updates. Downloading 6GB without warning me and giving me a chance to do it on my schedule is not using good judgment.
I'm extremely disappointed that I had "turned off" my development work PCs automatic updates, however after a few weeks I found the telemetry update (KB3068708) for Windows 7 installed fully without my consent.
I had "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them," selected in Windows Update for this category of update. I did not choose to install this, and I was made aware from a HN thread made a few weeks ago.
The update was visible, at that time, but not installed. Now, a few weeks later, the update is on my computer. I believe the update was actually installed during an unrelated security update which I had allowed.
I'm wondering if I'll have to use external scripts of my own or third party to remove the telemetry bug on my computer.
This is really infuriating... Microsoft, what the hell?
I really hope steam machines take off (and stay relatively open). As soon as I'm happy with the number of games Linux supports I'm dropping windows like a rock.
It's crazy that Microsoft gets so much heat for trying everything it can to get people to its latest OS. By this time next week, a couple hundred million people will be running iOS 9. Within six months they should have 85-90% of their users on it. This makes it better for Apple, developers, and the users. Windows needs a little more of an "onward" mentality.
Microsoft is getting heat for trying everything they can because they're supposed to be "trying everything they should," instead of violating their user's expectations.
It's great the MS wants everyone on their latest OS. But "latest" doesn't mean "best." Taking away user choice subverts the economic principles that encourage improvement -- that "best" is decided by the consumer, not the producer.
It would be ideal for developers if we all just used one OS. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for the customers, the economy, or society.
Arguably all software vendors who sell a product should be prepared to do two things:
1. continue fixing bugs in their prior products.
2. create new features in new products.
People who buy something, e.g. an original iPad, no longer get OS updates even though the item was advertised as being safe to use to access content on the internet. This is provably false and while EULA shenanigans provide a fig leaf of propriety, the reality is what was sold was defective and if it's possible to fix it they should.
Opting out of updates means that you don't get fixes. The argument that you agree to these kinds of changes in fundamental behavior because you are receiving new features is B.S. The company sold me a defective product and certain documented behaviors. I'm ok with those behaviors but I want the product to work for the features advertised. I should have to tolerate excessive data collection simply to get a functional product.
Just for the record the iPad2 still updates. Though the hardware can barely handle iOS8. It's almost unusable. It seems crazy to think there would not be an end of support for something that old. Maybe Apple doesn't allow updates because they don't want the original iPad to become completely unusable?
The old devices become effectively unusable as new bugs are discovered and patches are not created, tested and distributed.
It should be possible to fix bugs without having to add in new features. E.g. I shouldn't need to upgrade to floating icons with a parallax background to get a fix for PDF parsing problems.
You can also still manually install fixes if you don't allow automatic updates. I can't understand why these people with such low datacaps would allow automatic updates anyway.
Microsoft seems a bit more opaque about it than Apple - I've got pcs, a macbook and an iPhone and with Apple it's always a straight forward so and so is available, do you want to download it? Windows not quite so much.
Chrome auto-updates, but if it auto-updated itself into a completely different program, then I would have a problem with it. A lot of people enabled auto-updates in Windows without being under the expectation that their whole OS would upgrade.
It's like how putting "this EULA can change at any time" doesn't allow you to change the EULA to do subversive things. People agree to them under reasonable expectations. Using the terms and settings as a Trojan Horse is not respectful of those expectations.
I'm not sure all the outrage against MS is justified since we're just talking about a large download, not any change to the user's system, or sharing of information, etc. (Though I might feel differently if my bandwidth were metered.)
But I also can't fathom how so many on this thread are willing to conclude that users consented to this by enabling automatic updates. Because, of course, you don't just consent to have Windows download any old "thing" when you enable automatic updates. You only consent to have it download updates!
While the definition of "update" is surely ambiguous and not set in stone, it should surely be guided (I would think) by the sorts of things Microsoft has called "Windows Updates" in the past. And I don't think there is a good argument that this would include a 6 GB download of an entirely new version of the OS.
That download is costing people money, and if there is any justice left in the US, it will result in a class action lawsuit.
People in Redmond or Silicon Valley with good internet connections need to remember that a lot of people don't have that luxury. Extremely low bandwidth connections are still very common in the US, and metered connections are an unfortunate reality for many people around the world.
This. This is the thing that makes you question the justice system in the US? Maybe they should have a class action suit against ISPs for having shitty caps? I'm in rural Ohio and I don't have a 2gb cap per month. If I did I certainly wouldn't enable automatic updates for any software.
> This is the thing that makes you question the justice system in the US?
I never claimed this.
> I don't have a 2gb cap.
Good. That doesn't mean everybody else does. Stop projecting your situation onto everybody else.
> I certainly wouldn't enable automatic updates
As you're posting to HN, I can assume you are very familiar with computers and understand how to do that. Everybody else just wanted the small security patches that Windows Update provided for years, with minimal impact on data caps.
Even just that can be a problem, since it is quite common these days for people to have a small SSD boot drive, and put everything else in a secondary hard drive.
The download could use all remaining space on the SSD, which could cause a variety of problems unless/until the user figured out the problem and deleted the 6 GB download.
Wildly incorrect, there are a vast number of 64 GB SSD's in use, and 500gb drives are NOT small in any case, they are still borderline too expensive for the average consumer.
But it hardly matters, since it's well known that storage needs always exceed available capacity, and 500gb is tiny compared with with today's needs, which may be represented by a reasonable hard disk capacity of 3TB or so.
So even a 500 GB drive won't fit all of the desired 3 TB in the first place, so it's already under pressure even before Microsoft randomly decides it's ok to use up over 1% of it.
And for the much more common 64 GB SSDs, this is 10% of their total capacity.
Which means that 6 GB can never just be assumed to be so trivially small that it won't have a really negative effect on anyone.
You picked a terribly contrafactual way to be a Microsoft apologist.
For anyone running Windows 7 or 8.1 that wants to stop the Windows 10 upgrade pop-ups or the download if the PC hasn't already downloaded it, uninstall and hide KB3035583.
(Also bear in mind the realities for a New Zealand ISP. I suspect that a large portion of their traffic comes from overseas, and capacity ain't free on whatever undersea cables happen to land in NZ...)
And that's a large part of why Windows security has always been terrible. While we may not have expected it, that just means we were pleasantly surprised.
Claiming consent because automatic updates are on is really, really a stretch. Strikes me as disingenuous. I'm very surprised they've done this, it just seems so stupid and prone to backfire.
In yet another fashion, MS demonstrating its considerable disconnect from and lack of understanding of (and/or apparent will to understand) a significant portion of its "average users".
A lot of people have space and bandwidth limitations. We don't all live it the land of huge capacity and unmetered fiber connections.
I wouldn't argue that I haven't given consent if I have "download updates automatically" in my settings.
That being said, Microsoft should use better judgment in terms of checking for available disk space (i.e. don't auto download 6GB worth of updates unless 20GB+ space is available on the drive) and not saturating customer connections since the update is by no means critical (i.e. limit it to 10% of the user's bandwidth)
I don't think 20GB is enough to make 6GB a trivial amount. I'd say more like 100GB.
MS needs to prompt when downloading amounts of data over a few hundred megabytes, period. There are still places in the world where a prompt is required even for amounts measured in megabytes.
Isn't there an on-by-default option that causes Windows to behave differently wrt. updates if you're on a metered connection? Still, it's on the user to mark their connection as metered...
Every week I adjust my (icon bar?) settings to change the "Get Windows 10" application back to "Show only notifications". Windows keeps resetting it to "Show icons and notifications". Perhaps I should file that as a bug report.
Why are we allowing any of the corporations, governments, and police departments to get away with any of the stupid shit they continuously do? Mostly because it would take a significant act of power to do anything about it, power which we don't have and even if we do, we do not wish to exercise. The exercising of which would probably cause more problems in the short term than it would solve. Most people will not do anything about such problems.
> Mostly because it would take a significant act of power to do anything about it, power which we don't have and even if we do, we do not wish to exercise.
It starts a step before that - awareness. Most folks aren't aware of the things that are done, and even of those who are only a minor subset consider these things to be a problem.
Lack of motivation to try to make change winnows out most of those who get past the first two problems. The unfortunate truth is that of the small subset who are aware and offended, most simply have higher priorities.
> Most folks aren't aware of the things that are done
I totally disagree. With today's media most people are hyper aware, disproportionately, of everything that goes on. Perhaps even desensitized by their over-awareness.
Agreed, most will probably do nothing that's an inconvenience. It just seems that Windows 10 should be causing us all to leave Windows completely since it is out rightly not respecting users and not even caring about it. Linux time.
As long as MS gets paid, they will do what they want, so stop paying them. Stop giving them revenue directly, and stop giving them market share that that they profit from indirectly.
Anybody that continues to use their products is asking for more of this crap. Some may complain that their business depends on Windows; that's unfortunate, but why didn't they have a second source for all mission critical dependencies?
I don't know if it's a matter of our business depending on Windows more than our business wanting to depend on Windows. We like using Windows because they have such an awesome product. Same thing with Apple. I got the new OS and all of a sudden my iphone 3g started going unbearably slow... so I had to get a new iphone.
My stance is... if they use 6gb of my internet to download updates... okay, whatever... i get unlimited(ish). But if I turn it off and it still does it... that sounds more like a bug in their software. It's still not a big enough deal for me not go with Windows for an OS... it's too good of an OS. I don't think it warrants boycotting MS.
P.S. I didn't pay for Win10. They gave me the upgrade for free.
Is Microsoft/Apple/Google/etc. prepared to pay me for software that I've previously purchased but is incompatible with their newer OS? Plus any costs associated with finding new software, training on the new software, migrating to the new software, etc.?
Is there a reason Windows just lets you run out of disk space? On Linux when I'm downloading something and come close to running out of space the download stops and I get an alert saying I need to delete something.
MS statement: "For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade."