I heard Windows 11 has been updated to take screenshots of your computer. Is it theoretically possible for them to delete content from your PC or external hard drives if they can determine that you have pirated content on them? Can they theoretically report you for it? I know it’s unlikely but is it still possible? I’m thinking of switching to Linux and this may be the reason why.
Edit: Thank you all for your educated answers. I really appreciate y’all!
The Windows system user has full control over the PC including hard drive content and network connection, so yes, it is theoretically possible. However, there are endpoint protection tools that also have full control over Windows, and if the OS ever deleted a user’s stuff, they’d notice and it would become public, which would be an insane PR nightmare for Microsoft.
Would Microsoft even care? Do normies think about this kind of thing?
Google’s gemini has been delivering some pants-on-head stupid results in the search and Google’s comment on the situation was basically “ya, it do be that way”.
There’s a difference between “haha silly LLM” and an operating system used by potentially billions of people, including businesses, governments, military, scanning and deleting your potentially sensitive information.
My point was to illustrate a comparable big corpo’s flippant response to negative PR.
We’ve entered a stage in the software industries development where these mega corps are making so much money off of your data that they simply don’t care about PR, very often responding to negative PR in a consumer hostile manner.
Besides, Microsoft has been scraping personal data through Windows for over a decade. Why would they stop now? Business/enterprise licenses will likely have the ability to disable the recall feature. Regular consumers can go fuck themselves, as usual.