Microflaccid Screws the Pooch

A court in France has ruled that Windows 10 illegally invades user privacy, as well as being too insecure:

A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.

The warning comes from the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), an independent data privacy watchdog with the power to levy fines against companies. The CNIL has been investigating Windows 10 since its launch and has now drawn up a damning list of criticisms.

"The CNIL has decided to issue a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to comply with the Act within three months," said the group on Wednesday.

………

Chief among the regulator's concerns is the amount of information Windows 10 slurps up about its users and sends back to Microsoft's servers. While all recent flavors of Windows send some information back to Redmond, Windows 10 harvests much more and the CNIL considers this intrusive and also not needed to run the OS.

It could also be breaking the law. The collapse of the Safe Harbor agreement last year didn't stop this flow of data from French users back to the US, and the CNIL is concerned that Microsoft made no attempt to comply with the law. The watchdog estimates that there are at least 10 million Windows users in the Euro nation.

This in addition to buying Nokia's cell phone business, where they wrote down over 7 billion dollars , and then they sold off the Nokia brand.

And then there is the whole ribbon thing in the more recent versions of Office.

Why is this company still a going concern?