According to the YouTube channel PC Security Channel, Microsoft’s Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond-based software giant, but also to several third parties.
To analyze the DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a new laptop, the PC Security Channel used Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer that shows exactly what’s happening on the network. The results were enough for the channel to call Windows 11 “spyware.”
A brand new Windows 11 PC that had never been used for internet access was communicating not only with Windows Update, MSN and Bing servers, but also with Steam, McAfee, geo.prod.do and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com. After all, the new operating system from Microsoft collected and sent telemetry data to various research companies and advertising services. Also, even when telemetry tracking is disabled by third-party utilities, Windows 11 still sends some data.
To prove its point, the channel tried to find out which servers the fresh Windows XP contacted. It turned out that the only addresses that the twenty-year-old operating system contacted were the servers of the Windows Update Center and Microsoft programs. However, this is not surprising in 2023 – many services have stopped supporting XP and interaction with it has decreased.
The testing could be more complete and more objective if the experimenters carefully set up Windows, disabling all possible options for sending data and measuring the activity again. But the purpose of the experiment was to determine the behavior of a freshly installed operating system, without any additional settings – including those made when the system is first started.
Obviously, a lot has changed in 20 years, and we use more online services now than we did in the early 2000s. As a result, various telemetry data must be sent to the Internet to support certain functions. But perhaps Microsoft should ask for the user’s consent in a more explicit form and specify in more detail what and where will be sent – it is still quite difficult to give up the existing functions of sending data.
We have already mentioned the fact that manufacturers of smartphones with Android OS host software of third-party manufacturers and network services with system privileges, which implies the corresponding exchange of data with external servers. It’s hard to say if Microsoft is doing something like this, but sending data to Steam or McAfee looks pretty weird.
The share of Windows 11 reached 18.1% among Microsoft operating systems – against the background of obsessive advertising of the full-screen update in Windows 10
Source: Tom’s Hardware
