Clarifying
Just to clarify here, I'm not saying that the behaviour listed in the article is acceptable for a shipping product, I'm saying that there's not a chance that's what they're doing. We're living on a continent where it's now illegal to operate a website that places cookies on someone's computer without notifying them what a cookie is and what it's there for and promising not to track them so I don't think for one minute that if this data was being collected then they'd be getting away with it.
Yes there are lots of commentators out there that are saying this is what Microsoft are doing, but they're all quoting each other and there isn't actually any documentation or evidence of any kind about this. This particular article links to Reddit, a forum with no Microsoft staff present on it, and other Reg articles as "evidence" for what is going on. The quote from the website isn't on the page linked to, and it's not on the page that that links to either. The only official documentation they list in the support article is about the CEIP, which has been around for years and is for collecting crash dumps and stats.
Maybe I'll be proved wrong, maybe they'll get hacked and everyone's personally identifiable information will be out there all of a sudden and no one will be safe, or maybe all of a sudden they'll realise that I'm not interested in Sky TV (which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing!) but I doubt it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
