For me, it is a better OS than W8. On a tablet however it still has some weak points for bringing up keyboard when needed.

Not so different to what google have been doing with it's services and android for over a decade...

I don't see anything in the privacy policy that Microsoft, Apple, Google, et al. haven't been doing for years. The potential of "personalised adverts" is unpleasant but the wording does state that personal data won't be used to serve those so it's pretty much as it always has been with targeting adverts. The potential to disclose anything and everything to "the law" has always been there since before computers existed though it has only recently been admitted that warrants have never been necessary to obtain any information "the law" wants.
Of course, barring Ubuntu which must have pretty much the same privacy policy as Microsoft if one thinks about it, using Linux is a far better option but I very much doubt Apple or Google are going to tell "the law" to get lost if they demand the contents of your email account, cloud account or whatever...

Not that I don't think this is bad, by the way, just that I don't think Windows 10 is any worse than any other commercial OS.

If you use google mail, you've already given away far more about yourself than windows 10 ever could. Mozilla and Opera browsers have had built in google tracking for years, never mind chrome and of course Android phones are pretty much riddled with tracking and spyware, but for some reason some people accept google spying on their every move, but if MS try to do the same, there's the usual scandal...

Google is a website and a set of web-based applications. You don't have to use them or, at least, you can choose whether, when, and to what extent you use them. Similarly, you don't have to use an Android or iJunk phone--you can still get dumb phones.

I believe that baking spying into an OS, while maybe not morally different from what Google et al. do, is qualitatively different.

Folks obsess about the NSA and back doors, but never seem to pay attention to the front door.

The sad thing is that most Windows users will never even notice.

if they did not more of less come right out and say we are spying on you by looking at the settings i would tell people to upgrade to win10. but i cant fully support it after what i have seen from the good people on 4chan.

The same can be said about Windows. Like Microsoft in the computer market, Google has attained a level of presence on the internet that most people equate internet with Google. Most people are unaware that alternatives exist, so although
it is quantitatively the same.

Besides, if millions of people willingly use g-mail knowing Google is keeping copies their messages, they will not care about spying in their OS and telephone.

One thing I will say about Google: they do write their TOS in plain language. But how many of those persons have read Google's TOS and thought about the implications?

I don't go through the day obsessing about internet companies' spying, really, I don't. I do try to be aware and cautious.

I must say I've been for some time mildly surprised by the number of persons from the geek community who have embraced Google, G+, and the like because they just work, without thinking about how they are essentially running nekkid through Google's servers.

Frankly, I think most of those folks who "willingly use gmail" &c. don't consider the implications ; they use it because it's convenient and it just works on every platform. They are like the donkey hitched to the plough who just keeps following that carrot suspended from the stick extended from the yoke over their shoulders . . .

I recently started listening to Geek News Central again (I had to curtail my podcast listening for a while because I ran out of time--GNC is a good way to keep on top of tech news, and Tod is a truly decent guy). Tod mentioned in a recent one (I think it was this one, but wouldn't make book on it) how the sort of information he is offered by internet marketeers is really unnerving, to the extent that they have told him they could tell him the size of your trousers (waist and inseam).

Now, I'm quite happy with the size of my trousers, thanks to free weights and a bicycle, but it's not something I particularly want to share with others without knowing them first-hand, and perhaps not even then.

Menchen was right.

Begs the question, how many people in the geek community are geeks?

And you don't have to use windows either. In fact a large proportion of web users don't. idevices and android, chromeos, etc are now much more popular and a lot of people are actually doing their communicating, socialising, shopping and even banking through those. Where windows is still very strong is of course in the corporate workstation/server sector. This is why giving away windows 10 for 'free' to home PC users with existing 7/8/8.1 non-corporate licenses made perfect business sense.

In fact you don't have that much choice with google and it's services because they're pretty much everywhere (including built into some popular browers and this site) and even if you avoid them, you may still have to interact with those that do.

Well android is an OS and 'baked in spyware' is pretty much why it's 'free'.

Neither will Apple and google users. This is not a windows thing. They are just catching up with what the other big players have already been doing for a long time.
I believe 'geek' is just a slang term these days for someone with a certain type of fashion sense who can reel off all the iproduct models they've ever owned in sequence...

I used it for three weeks, if was fine but didn't run all that well on my i5/16GB/SSD laptop for some reason.

I read online that windows 10 scans your local drive and private folders for who knows what purpose.

Does android and google scan our local drives?

If one is using anything Google for some reason, it is best practice to assume Google is mining every bit of information it can.

Linuxquestions is populated by users with an above average grasp of all things computer. These users sometimes forget that the rest of the population are essentially clueless when it comes to computing and technology in general. The marketing "facade" is what the newspapers with the dumbed down technology columns and mass consumer driven TV news focus on.

If you got 10 random ordinary people together and told them that google were spying on them via their smartphone 50% would be surprised, but accept it as 'the done thing' and the other 50% would laugh at you and ignore you. Either way, none of these people would give up their convenience and social networks, just because some nobody was spreading scare stories about something they haven't even the vaguest understanding of.

You may as well have come up with a batty conspiracy theory like: VW put some software into your car so that it will pass emissions testing.... oh wait...

Indeed, cynwulf, I have to agree. You only have to look at Facebook where the creator of the site describes his content creators (people with Facebook accounts) in detrimental terms yet, still, people creat content so his customers will pay him. If people don't care that an unpleasant, anti-social person is literally laughing at their stupidity for posting on his site as he enjoys the wealth he accumulates I doubt very much that they care Google reads all the the email in their gmail account so that their customers can provide better adverts to them.