Want to see all data Windows 10 sends Microsoft? There’s an app for that
The next big update to Windows 10 will be even more transparent about what it collects.
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Following the publication last year of the data collected by Windows 10's built-in telemetry and diagnostic tracking, Microsoft today announced that the next major Windows 10 update, due around March or April, will support a new app, the Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer, that will allow Windows users to browse and inspect the data that the system has collected.
Windows 10 has two settings for its data collection, "basic" and "full." The documentation last year described all the data collected in the "basic" setting but only gave a broad outline of the kinds of things that the "full" setting collected. The new app will show users precisely what the full setting entails and a comparison with what would be sent with the basic setting.
The utility of the app will tend to vary depending on what data is being inspected. The presentation is low-level (Microsoft's screenshots show JSON structured data using various magic numbers—numeric values that encode information but without any key to explain what information each number encodes), so straightforward reading and interpretation will remain limited.
As with the specification from last year, the new tool is a step forward in openness but arguably not really addressing any of the data-collection complaints that Windows 10 has generated. The reaction we've seen consistently in comment threads, e-mail, Twitter, and beyond, is not so much a concern over what Microsoft is collecting but, rather, the mere fact that Microsoft is collecting data. The view that has been expressed to us repeatedly, and at length, is that the company should offer an option to mainstream users that has no data collection at all (an option already offered by the Enterprise edition).
Being more transparent about first basic and now full data collection doesn't move any closer to offering such an option. It shows that Microsoft feels it has nothing to hide and that there is nothing untoward about the collected information, but the company continues to maintain that this collection serves an essential role for detecting, diagnosing, and addressing bugs and incompatibilities across the enormously diverse Windows ecosystem.
