Windows 11 sends massive amounts of user data to addresses not only owned by Microsoft but also by third parties, including Google and market research firms. This was found out by the authors of the YouTube channel PC Security Channel, who compared the network activity of the latest version of Windows 11 and Windows XP.
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Some conspiracy theorists argue that Windows 11 is first and foremost spyware, and sooner or later all user data ends up for sale on the dark web. This statement, of course, is greatly exaggerated, but the system really makes a lot of calls.
In addition to numerous resources from Microsoft itself, the data is sent to the addresses of Akamai CDN provider, Digicert certification authority, Google, McAfee antivirus developer, ScorecardResearch, a marketing research project, and Onetrust, which is engaged in similar activities. The depressing fact is that all this network activity was found on a laptop running Windows 11, which was first connected to the Internet – only the Wireshark program was installed, which analyzes traffic.
For comparison, the authors of the experiment decided to repeat it on a Windows XP machine – traffic analysis showed an incomparably less disturbing picture: the only server that the old system tried to contact was the Windows Update resource. No Google, MSN, Bing, and even more dubious market research.
Windows 11 starts messaging with all of these services the first time you connect to the internet, without any hint of asking permission from the user. The capabilities of the latest generation system are far superior to what Windows XP could do, and it can be assumed that some of these functions cannot work without an Internet connection. However, the list contains resources that have nothing to do with the operation of the basic functions of the system – they simply collect user data, only improving the relevance of advertising. At the same time, Windows 11 is not free – users pay for the system and for the data collection tools that come with it.
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