Did you know that Microsoft just turns Copilot writing assist on for webpages in Microsoft Edge?
So like, if you type in edit boxes, it just... gets sent to Microsoft? Straight up?
And this is enabled by default?
So first, what the actual hell? Second, why is nobody talking about this? How the hell is right now the first time I find out about this?

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in reply to Talon

in fairness, a lot of people talked about this when Windows 11 was being rolled out. It caused a lot of people to switch to Linux. But those who know don't want to flog a dead horse when they think other people already know. Obviously, plenty of people still don't.

I think MS's communications team is much stronger at suppressing this than the internet's ability to spread the message, and there is the real problem.

in reply to Talon

Ms Windows is not an OS. It is an Microsoft endpoint at your home to serve Ms business. Edge is not a webbrowser. It is a tool of Microsoft to know what you are browsing in the web. Chrome is not a web browser, it is a tool of Google. Android is not an OS, it is a tool for many companies to inform them everything about you, what you watch, what you listen to, what you are interested in, when you go to bed and when you wake up.
I'm surprised that you are surprised.
in reply to Talon

don’t worry, microsoft pinky promises in their privacy statement that they don’t persist any of this data. 😅

It’s definitely not compliant with GDPR, at least my understanding of it.

They just rolled out a writing assistance API in edge with a local phi 4 mini model. My guess is they’ll be moving this feature over to that when it goes out of beta.

in reply to Talon

ah. sorry. yeah Microsoft has had OS-level telemetry for a long time and it's incredibly intrusive. the first time they rolled out something that we personally found unacceptable was around 2003ish. everyone was very angry about it for a while, but the company never rolled it back and eventually people ran out of anger.

it's gotten worse, slowly but steadily, ever since.