Windows 10 slammed for collecting vast user data

Windows 10 has been severely criticised over its aggressive upgrade tactics, privacy concerns and lack of user choice, in a damning new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The EFF, which earlier ranked WhatsApp as the worst mobile app for user privacy, has now pointed to the amount of data Microsoft siphoned from Windows 10 users.

"Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage data back to Microsoft," writes Amul Kalia, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Here's a non-exhaustive list of data sent back - location data, text input, voice input, touch input, webpages you visit, and telemetry data regarding your general usage of your computer, including which programs you run and for how long."

The amount of data sent to Microsoft increased with the use of assistant Cortana, which can set reminders, launch web searches, order a taxi, track flight information and more.

The EFF goes on to say "many users find features like Cortana useful, and that such features would be difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to implement in a way that doesn't send data back to the cloud," and   faults Microsoft for not including the ability to completely cut all communications between users' machines and its own servers.

Meanwhile, Facebook has revealed the extensive list of users' information it held on to match adverts with Facebook users.

These include age, hometown, school, friends, and even when a user started a new relationship. The social network calculates how much money users would likely spend on their next car, tracked what operating system users used to login to the social network, and more.

It also tracked the types of credit cards of users.