Security company reportedly gains access to telemetry data of all Windows 10 devices

Security company FireEye recently closed a deal with Microsoft to integrate its iSIGHT security service into Windows Defender. Wit the deal, the company gets access to the collected telemetry data of all Windows 10 devices.

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The information comes from the Australian website ARNNet which writes, "Terms of the deal will see FireEye gain access to telemetry from every device running Windows 10, serving up access to almost 22 per cent of the total desktop market, alongside laptops and Windows mobile phones."

When Windows 10 was released there was an enormous amount of criticism on how Microsoft collected data for the OS. Privacy aware users created tools to disable 'tracking' as they often refer to the data collection methods Microsoft employs. And also the EFF worried about the amount of data that Windows 10 sent back to Microsoft.

Microsoft has never been secretive about its possibility to share telemetry information with third parties, "Microsoft may share business reports with OEMs and third party partners that include aggregated and anonymized telemetry information. Data-sharing decisions are made by an internal team including privacy, legal, and data management."

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Telemetry data is collected to improve software, in the case of Windows 10 this could be the hardware used, applications installed and how frequent they are used or reliability information on device drivers, as Microsoft explains on this page. The company stresses that e.g. Bing searches or the user's location for local weather or news isn't, the company calls that functional data.

"There are subtle differences between telemetry and functional data. Windows collects and sends telemetry in the background automatically. You can control how much information is gathered by setting the telemetry level. Microsoft tries to avoid collecting personal information wherever possible (for example, if a crash dump is collected and a document was in memory at the time of the crash). On the other hand, functional data can contain personal information. However, a user action, such as requesting news or asking Cortana a question, usually triggers collection and transmission of functional data," Microsoft goes on to explain.

In Fireye's press release announcing the deal there is no mention of gaining access to Microsoft's telemetry data. It's also unclear what the company will do with the telemetry data but it's likely used to improve its product which in its turn should improve the security of Windows 10.

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