Microsoft "Genuine Advantage" phones home
Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2006 9:11 pm
We've all suspected for a long time that Microsoft knows more about your computer than it's telling. Someone finally published some evidence:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 8002958907
Turns out that with Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage" tool, your PC sends information to Microsoft every time it boots. And if you leave it on, it also does so periodically. This information is not anything they need to know, and it is not something for which you granted consent. It includes things like your hard drive serial number, user locale info, BIOS information, and your SID (Your SID is an encoded user id that uniquely identifies the user account).
The article is long, but there's a lot of important stuff in there.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 8002958907
Turns out that with Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage" tool, your PC sends information to Microsoft every time it boots. And if you leave it on, it also does so periodically. This information is not anything they need to know, and it is not something for which you granted consent. It includes things like your hard drive serial number, user locale info, BIOS information, and your SID (Your SID is an encoded user id that uniquely identifies the user account).
The article is long, but there's a lot of important stuff in there.