One possible reason is that the actual data that's being sent is a lot less nefarious than is being implied.
I've seen people vehemently argue that merely checking if a new version is available amounts to horrible invasive unethical tracking. You might want to turn that off for the truly paranoid situations, and that's fair, but it's of course completely different than "sends all your data".
I don't have a Windows machine and I certainly don't have PowerPoint, so I can't actually check anything myself. But I see a lot of confirmation biasing going on in this thread, and I bet most people didn't check anything either. All I can give this article is a shrug.
> I've seen people vehemently argue that merely checking if a new version is available amounts to horrible invasive unethical tracking. You might want to turn that off for the truly paranoid situations, and that's fair, but it's of course completely different than "sends all your data".
Hahaha, I've been there. And in an open-source code base, no less! We were using a closed-source library to actually send the version data up to the telemetry service we were using, but the payload and how we were handing it to that library were clearly defined in our own source. We even had to request a correction to a major IT news outlet because they had some vague language about "and no one could possibly know what kind of telemetry $BigCorp is sending, and it can't even be disabled". Both were demonstrably false: the payload was visible in OSS, and we had a well-documented env variable that you could use to disable the version telemetry before you first start of the application (which was linked from the graphical installers as well).
In this case, I think the entire content payload is probably being sent up--if you've ever used this PowerPoint feature, it's clear that they're suggesting icons and themes based on the words in your slide--but there's a clear as day prompt explaining what's going on when you first enable the feature.
I'd _prefer_, of course, that Microsoft figure out how to bring the model onto the device so you _don't_ have to go off-box. Google managed to pull this off with the Now Playing feature on their newer Pixel devices[1]. But it is really hard, and I do somewhat understand the business aspect of "that's our secret sauce, we don't want to give it away".
"Telemetry" is not "sending the contents of your documents" (or at least, not necessarily so). This comment kind of demonstrates my point about the complete lack of nuance in these conversations.
And to reply to your reply:
> That’s exactly what telemetry is
The common understanding of telemetry is sending metadata about how people are using software. That is, things like "this button was clicked", "this feature was used", etc. That is my understanding of the word anyway.
Either way, this is a bit of a boring semantic discussion; my point is just that there is nuance to these things, and that this article doesn't really tell us anything concrete beyond "the network is used". Well, okay ... but for what, exactly? Because that does matter.
That’s what it meant a few years ago to me as well. But has expanded in practice. Yes this is too much focus on a single word.
The article states that text content is being sent, and that it makes sense according to the touted feature. Enough details given what we already know, though stingy.
More info would be useful to folks less familiar with the subject however the core issue here is somewhat old news.
