So I heard Microsoft’s latest Windows update has some tracking software called Recall. For years I have been laughing my tail off since Microsoft decided to put ads in the start menu and changed the “search” function to a web search.
So why is this happening? Greed is whats happening. The advertisement game has changed a lot in the past ten or so years. A advertiser would have a sales ad and it would be a 50/50 shot of a person buying the product. Now you just look at something and you have it follow you everywhere on the net until you give in. Companies now make more money by tracking you and selling off your information. To these people we are like trading cards basically.
Now since Microsoft can track every little move you make they can and will get more money off your information. Whats worse now the three letter agencies can pay off or even demand Microsoft info on you for any reason.
Some people think “I’ll just switch to Apple!”. Nah, Apple isn’t much different and you’ll be paying more for it.
Honestly your best bet is to migrate to Linux. Also for the love of god don’t choose Ubuntu. Canonical the maintainer of Ubuntu is no better then Microsoft and Apple. For a beginner I would use Solus Linux and if you already know Linux but want a distro to call home I would check out OpenSUSE. I recently migrated to OpenSUSE and I can’t believe why I waited so long. OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed) works like a typical linux distro and it’s using Kernel 6.9.1 and has better hardware support out of the box. Another option is Manjaro and be part of the Arch Linux crowd.
I tried Solus Linux and had it on a laptop for a while. It was in my opinion an alright distro. It’s a rolling release so down the road you don’t have to reinstall for a newer version. A few friends that were interested in Linux but didn’t know where to start I pointed out Solus to them and they still use it today.
Reason why I didn’t mention Linux Mint is because it’s based off of Kubuntu and Kubuntu it’s owned by Canonical and Linux Mint uses the same packaged software repos as Ubuntu. Any distro based off of Ubuntu I would avoid.
Now if you want you can take baby steps and spin up a virtual machine and run Linux on that until you feel like installing it on real hardware or if you have an old system laying around you can try it out on that. Trust me, it’s not that bad. You’ll run into a few hiccups learning a new system but it’s very easy and most community message boards can help you out. Let alone you wouldn’t be the only one running into an issue and a simple web search quickly finds the solution.
If you plan to stay with Windows at this point it would be like using a secured password like $5ty8%>hq for your home WiFi and using 123456 as your online banking password.