Microsoft telemetry

The advent of forced telemetry in Windows 10 caused a stir in the IT Pro and Enterprise administration space. For those unaware of this, Windows 10 keeps logs of many activities performed on it and ships those (anonymized) data points back to Microsoft for advanced analytics. Before you panic, let's explore what is collected and why.

What is collected?

• Type of hardware being used
• Applications installed and usage details
• Reliability information on device drivers

Why is it collected?

Microsoft gives many reasons for collecting this data. The general takeaway here should be that Microsoft uses telemetry to do its best on the functionality of future versions as well as spending the resources to fix problems in a real-world priority scenario. For example, in the past, if 10,000,000 crashes occurred in Explorer.exe daily in the world and they all had the same debugging call stack in them, Microsoft might not have really been aware of this issue until either many calls were made by end users at home or enterprise customers called in with some frequency on the issue.

With Windows 10, Microsoft is listening to the stability metrics of the code they write. Given the same 10,000,000-crashes-a-day scenario in Windows 10, you can rest assured that Microsoft would dedicate resources to address the problem with all due haste. So there is a benefit here for home users, enterprise users, and everyone in between.

Now given all this, can you opt-out? If you are a home user, not really, no. If you are an enterprise or school and are using the appropriate license/SKU, then yes, you can. But should you? Does the potential loss of important data to Microsoft or third-parties outweigh the benefits to all users (including your organization) having a better experience? For some organizations, this is an easy decision tree. For others, certainly, it may be a more complicated scenario.

There are different levels of telemetry collected as well. They go from a baseline of security collections only up to a full-blown delivery of application usage patterns at the highest level. Given the changing nature of the WaaS model, I encourage you to review the whole concept of telemetry as it exists during your implementation process. Currently, the telemetry settings are documented in depth at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/configure-windows-telemetry-in-your-organization and are worth looking at to understand the exposure (if any) versus the gain.