Software vendor tricks to invade our privacy

Let's take a look at Visual Studio 2017. It's being made available generally, but lets look not at the solution but precisely how it's being made available and the general pattern of disgusting behavior of the modern software age.

I will outline the pattern rather than the specifics, since the pattern applies generally to many vendors.

1. Vendor creates some tool and attempt to engender a market desire for the tool (fair enough)
2. Vendor provides some Stub Executable to gain access to the tool. The key features of this stub are:
• Contains nothing of value or use to yourself 
• It's primary aim is to make sure the vendor has all your details without giving anything away
• It will invoke several internet requests and connections to the vendor providing them with many details about your system (none of which they will tell they are sending except in a vague way to meet privacy laws).
• It (eventually) downloads other components, many of which are completely unnecessary for your task, but essential for the vendors ongoing profiling of you.
• Often, the stub will even reconfigure your system to ensure the vendors program can always connect to the vendors systems whenever your online (without any prompting or asking).
3.  If your fortunate, after the Stub finishes it's dissection of your system and sends its analysis to the vendor, you may receive a version of the software you actually desired when you downloaded the stub executable. Though a very real possible outcome is that you are denied download due to the analysis made.

Now, all this information the vendor is getting is what older generation know to be "their market value". Advertisers and other marketing companies resell or pay (depending) for information about us as potential consumers of their products (and need to know this information to be a success). It is valuable information to have and retain, though for us, it is a cost to give it away (since a person unaware of my habits provides prices based on their desire to sell, but someone aware of my usages, can provide prices based on my documented needs (if they know I need something, they know they will be able to charge more and I won't have much of a choice but to pay). So I hope you can understand how giving away your details results in higher costs for yourself! Normally, this 'value' (our private information which may be used to identify what we want and need) is ours to control, since we have rights to privacy and choose with whom we share knowledge, so for example typically we are happy to let a relative know what we like so they could potentially buy us a better suited gift or let a friend know so they can select activities we may be interested in and let us know about them. Once these software's get on our system, we give up these 'rights' (and usually by implicit legal agreement via some privacy policy, which will make lots of claims of being 'decent' but clearly nothing about not using it to increase our costs).

It wouldn't even be SO bad, if we just gave away the information at the time of download, but modern software aims to ensure that we are profiled constantly. The value we receive is usually negligible, even to the extent where the software use agreement prohibits us profiting from using the software we get in many, many ways. Though the vendor gets ongoing access to our details, and usually because of the way the software is setup we will find it almost impossible to reasonably use without some kind of 'regular check in' with the vendor.

Google and Apple have taken this to it's ultimate evil by tieing all their services to a device which is, by design, giving out out details 24/7 (e.g. the Mobile Phone).

Having said all that, of course, its up to us how we make use (profitably) of the software we receive, though legally if you look into it, its normally only good for us in so much as it advantages also the software vendor.

I myself am a vendor of software, so I do realise the difficulties of a market place within which their has become a trend of many people providing their efforts free of charge (see Open Source). Open Source is a nice aim, but its at odds with an economic system driven by a need for profit to survive.

So I can, to an extent, understand why software giants wish to use every avenue to ensure profitability and to also protect their investments. The problem I have is that they do that without ethics. If a product asked you politely "if you wouldn't mind sharing" then a person can choose. I know many may point to the Microsoft "Customer experience improvement program" as a laudable example of this, and I do agree, the problem comes in that the only reason that exists is because their are still enough laws that Microsoft cannot blanket get us to agree to give them everything in one agreement, and by providing that mechanism many people not understanding will imagine they only provide information via this avenue. The reality is as soon as we agree to the license we are profiled.