Microsoft has gone too far.

[lightning4499]

Why are people continuously surprised by any of this? When you first start rcing through the phone to set it up, it asks you about "Your location"...repeatedly!! Especially when you download apps and update them. I for one am looking forward to Cortana and a lot of the new features this brings us WP users. I left WP briefly because I wanted to give Android a shot. Hated it. Glad I got a Lumia 925 and got my better camera back and am looking forward to 8.1. Apps?? How many do we really need? A few of this and that I can see, but most of the ones we have are great.. I still get people tellingme how cool my phone looks and I tell them it operates even cooler. Carry on people.

 

[dermotw]

1. People concerned with privacy can turn Cortana off.
2. People who haven't heard of Halo and Cortana will think the name is cool.

And 3. People who have read books will know where the name came from as well. It was the name of a sword belonging to the (legendary) Holger Danske, first written of in around 1060. Part of the European legends surrounding Charlemagne and King Arthur. I might wonder if MS knew that though... <grin> .

 

[a5cent]

when you say your phone sure. where this come from for cortana to know....from the cloud. so everything about you will be store on the cloud.

This is simply not true. Like I already said, Joe stressed that learning things about you through e-mails is done on the phone! On the phone is not in the cloud, so at least some learning processes occur entirely on your device (I'm still figuring out what is done where), meaning you aren't forced to hand over everything to your OS service providers for Cortana to work decently. This part I am sure about.

Surely some things will come from the cloud, like anything on facebook, but obviously you would have had to make that public in the first place, so I think stuff like that is irrelevant.

Now the question; is everything store to the cloud about you is private? or is some hacker could get access to?

The answer is obviously: "of course". However, I don't think that is the biggest problem. Far more worrying is what the companies who collect that data do with it. These companies have a lot of incentives to maximize the profits off that information, and nothing but their own moral judgement stands in the way of doing so. Companies are usually much better at making money than making moral judgements.

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

And 3. People who have read books will know where the name came from as well. It was the name of a sword belonging to the (legendary) Holger Danske, first written of in around 1060. Part of the European legends surrounding Charlemagne and King Arthur. I might wonder if MS knew that though... <grin> .

Yes, that was the reason the name was chosen for the character in the original Halo game.

 

[narv]

Side note... If you Bing translate Cortana it comes up with "Creating".. but google translate says nothing

 

[chrisevans937]

Cortana seems cool. Really making programs that are smart and will learn you. I don't have a problem with that. Seems like it will make searching a bit better because cortana knows what u like

 

[radmanvr]

Down here in Texas we would love for one of them government fellers to try and trespass on our property. That Mossberg 500.

 

[radmanvr]

Cortana seems cool. Really making programs that are smart and will learn you. I don't have a problem with that. Seems like it will make searching a bit better because cortana knows what u like

The only problem I see with this is well I watch a lot of adult content stuff and If someone wanted to borrow my phone to search for lets say idk lets say apples and a naked girl appears with an apple in her mouth hogged tied.

Would be kind of embarrassing. I guess I will keep my phone to myself after 8.1

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

Down here in Texas we would love for one of them government fellers to try and trespass on our property. That Mossberg 500.

Great way to bring politics into the topic /s

Personally with how Texans act I would be fine with Texas being declared a separate country. We could have avoided 2 Bush presidencies.

 

[borasar]

Cortana reminds me of some scary cyborg from a sci-fi show. It learns what you do, where you go, who you are, who and what you know, something that no piece of technology should ever know about you (No, I do not use Facebook).

I'm going to get my WP 8.1, turn off the location services,turn off all of the Cortana tracking features (Hopefully this can be done), and enjoy 8.1. I hate to disable the best feature WP 8.1 has, but I value my privacy over a nice-looking app that talks.

The last thing I want MS to do is send my location data, people I know, etc to the government...

By the way, thanks for crashing my profits, MS... (Signature). I guess i'll have to work on a Cortana exploit to make up the loss.

if you think the government doesn't have you location when they need to have it, regardless of whether you use cortana or location services, you are greatly mistaken.
regarding privacy, to each their own, i'm sure you'll find other things to enjoy on the OS aside from Cortana

 

[hs k]

Morpheus seems on a roll. Ahahaha. Dude you need to chill, your bp must be hitting planes up there.

 

[a5cent]

Sorry but IDC what platform you have if someone wants in they will get in government or not hard wired or wireless Bing or google your data, location, what you look at/do on your phone tablet computer is out there to see if you want to look hard enough by anyone.

Okay. We both agree that no data is safe from government. I think we can take this issue off the table, as it was never disputed. We can site examples all day long about how the NSA gets access to anything. However, it's incorrect to infer from this that anybody can get at any data they want, and we therefore might as well not care about security or privacy at all. There are huge differences between what government agencies and private companies can (or figure themselves legally allowed to) do.

Government and illegal access to data (NSA, malware, etc) are important issues. Even more important is what is done with the data that is obtained. Ultimately, I'm far more concerned about shady monetization practices, based on data that private companies collected through legal means. These are the things the Facebooks and Googles of the world are heavily incentivised to do, and eventually will do, should their fortunes ever change. It's just a question of "when", not "if". No company is perfect, but just the fact that some business models are based on the notion of "no privacy" should make it obvious that there will be differences. These are already glaringly obvious today, which is why I think we as consumers do have meaningful choices to make if we care about security and privacy. Not black and white choices, but which shade of grey we prefer.

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

Morpheus seems on a roll. Ahahaha. Dude you need to chill, your bp must be hitting planes up there.

Nope. I'm perfectly calm

It is always interesting when people assume things like that from text though.

 

[borasar]

They tried to ignore the personal assistant trend often dismissing it just to have to eat their words and be forced to implement one. I don't blame them, users want this sort of stuff even if privacy advocates don't like it. Ultimately their assistant seems rather crippled compared to google now. But I'll be giving it a try for sure when the preview is out. The nice thing about google now is how it predicts your needs before you have them. cortana doesn't do this (or at least they didn't show it). I suspect it isn't a matter of policy, but lack of engineering resources and time from MSFT. if you think it is creepy now, wait until they continue copying google now.

There you go again, you've spent zero time with this feature, yet you have an absolutely negative outlook on it based on a brief video presentation.

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

There you go again, you've spent zero time with this feature, yet you have an absolutely negative outlook on it based on a brief video presentation.

Not to mention that there are some rather odd fictional things in his post as regards the MS attitude towards personal assistants...considering MS has built such features into their software products in the past.

Seems to be a common occurrence from what I see in their post history.

 

[jmshub]

Microsoft has built Cortana with privacy in mind more than Google Now or Siri. At least with Cortana, you're going to be able to see what Cortana "knows" about you, and delete information as you see fit. Or, of course, simply not using it will keep it from gathering your information.

 

[Indistinguishable]

No they wouldn't. I've actually tested this out on every single major e-mail service myself...and even sent myself completely unencrypted easily read plain text copies of the anarchists cookbook, and even books about methamphetamine manufacture from Uncle Fester.

I do this about once or twice a year for when people try to make these claims.

They are far less advanced than people think, and there's far less access than people think. You can't get views and hits for stories though unless you make it sound more ominous than what it is.

Now do I think that the NSA and such go too far in their surveillance? Yes.
Is it as far reaching as the media makes it sound? No.

Dude... This is a messed up thing to do. I hope you realize that.

 

[jlzimmerman]

And 3. People who have read books will know where the name came from as well. It was the name of a sword belonging to the (legendary) Holger Danske, first written of in around 1060. Part of the European legends surrounding Charlemagne and King Arthur. I might wonder if MS knew that though... <grin> .

Which if anyone remembers in Halo 3 when the Master Chief was hearing echos of Cortana while she was in possession by the Grave Mind, she recites several passages. One of them was "I have defied gods and demons... I am your shield, I am your sword." This was a reference to Legends of Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane.

 

[psudotechzealot]

Hold up, wait a minute, when did a5cent become a mod?

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

Dude... This is a messed up thing to do. I hope you realize that.

Testing e-mail security by sending e-mails to myself as part of my job is messed up?