Coexist

Coexist

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Enough with the paranoid ignorance. There is NO keylogger in Windows 10.


What is with the ridiculous amount of people posting claims online that Windows 10 has a keylogger? Are people simultaneously really so very paranoid and ignorant?

Windows 10 doesn't have a keylogger. Certainly not in the malware sense. People are paranoid. They read something a blogger posted about the EULA online and draw wild conclusions about what Windows is doing. They read pseudo-news reports that touch on licensing terms but don't contain any examples, explanations, or evidence of these things happening at a software level. Claims about disabling software, disabling access to torrent sites, and keyloggers being built into Windows should be ignored and possibly ridiculed. I won't be breaking out a tin foil hat anytime soon. Microsoft isn't keeping a secret list of your downloads to sell to anti-piracy groups or law enforcement and they aren't recording your keystrokes and reading your e-mail.

A keylogger is software or even a hardware device that logs every key you press on your keyboard. It captures everything you type with the intent of finding personal messages, passwords, credit card numbers, and other data. I suppose if you are incredibly paranoid and use the strictest possible terms to define things you could call anything that captures characters a keylogger, but you wouldn't be right. By that definition your keyboard and your word processor would be keyloggers. 

The "Inking & Typing" function is what many bloggers are in an uproar over.  A keylogger records everything you type and the data is identifiable as yours. The correct term for what is erroneously being a called a keylogger in Windows 10 is "Text Analyses Engine" and it has a completely different function then a keylogger does This isn't a keylogger.

Microsoft isn't collecting personal or identifiable data via "Inking & Typing". Anonymous data  is gathered for product improvement. This data is used to improve the handwriting visual translation engine, to improve the user dictionary, language library and spell check functions in Windows. The data is put through rigorous, multi-pass scrubs to ensure it does not collect sensitive or identifiable fields (e.g., no email addresses, passwords, alpha-numerical data, etc.) according to Microsoft. They also say that the data is broken into very small bits and stripped of sequence data so it cannot be put back together or identified. Data samplings collected are limited; Microsoft isn't capturing all your keystrokes, nor are they reading your email or collecting banking info.

Don't succumb to FUD. If you are worried change your privacy settings. It is easy enough to do.

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