Someone wrote that code. I like to imagine that they know it's wrong, so they frame it as clearly as they can, without being fired. Guy could have written "Gaming Copilot is invading your privacy", or something like it, but that wouldn't pass.

Its frankly fucking comedic. Someone seriously thought that was a good way for it to communicate that its turned on 😂

I mean, it's apt. But companies are usually better at pretending they're not up to anything nefarious 😅

We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, our iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, App Store for Apple TV and iBooks Stores and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non‑personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy. We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address. With your explicit consent, we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps.

This is from Apple's privacy policy

It seems to me like they collect telemetry just like Windows, and of course some Mac apps do have advertising which is personalized according to the beginning.

Apple has been doing extremely invasive telemetry tracking of your usage since before the release of Big Sur. Gee, I wonder where Microsoft got the idea to invasively gather all this telemetry from the user in the first place?

MacOS or whatever they call it now is "unix-like" but it's still ultimately a closed environment and definitely not the same, ethically, as a real FOSS OS. Apple doesn't care about you any more than Microsoft or Google, they're also in it for money.

Proton is WINE, it's a fork maintained by Valve and Codeweaver with DXVK (Direct X -> Vulkan) on top. If you use Steam for gaming it will set up proton automatically for you.

And yes macOS is a step up from Windows, but it's still a walled garden. Want to develop an iOS app? You must buy a Mac, you must buy a developer license, you must use the worst IDE ever created, and you must distribute it through the app store (except in Europe in theory, but they worked hard to make the experience so miserable that almost no one bothers).

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it's fine. That's not even an especially lightweight distribution.

Doesn't Mac have something similar to Recall that they caught less flack for? I wouldn't trust Apple over Microsoft, they both want your data, Apple just has a façade of privacy awareness that they use to make sure others can't get their users data too

if only i didn't have to use adobe products, i'd already be on linux.

It's their AI brand 🤷‍♂️ like Samsung calling their android devices Galaxy, and Apple adding i to everything

And train AI

No. Avoid this by switching to a free operating system such as Debian. Windows is proprietary, there is no hope for privacy there.

Windows IoT can have compatibility issues with software because they're not the latest version of Windows (think Debian vs. Arch, but without Debian being the presumed default). Also you can't get a license for it legally.

This is all stuff I've heard second-hand, but it turned me off Windows IoT. So now I main Linux and have Windows 10 on my old Laptop (AND FFS WINDOWS STOP CHANGING MY FIREWALL SETTINGS).

I think if you uninstall the xbox app gaming copilot goes away. Might just be for the ltsc version though, which comes with a regular game bar and no Xbox app and only gets that ability from the Xbox app.

I am once again asking you to go to https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol and use the instructions to switch your windows install to windows 10 enterprise 21h2 iot ltsc so your computer will receive security updates until the year 2032.

Gaming copilot is a windows 11 feature iirc and the game bar, start menu ads and a bunch of other stuff aren’t present on 21h2 iot ltsc.

I used WinUtil and PolicyPlus to hopefully get rid of all that BS (at least until the next update...).

Not 9/10. They literally say in the article they will use the collected data to train their AI.