Terrible idea. These are the kind of features that should be opt in, and Microsoft could have done that instead.
It *is* an option. When you're setting up Windows 10, it asks you two screens of configuration questions, but most people will hit the "Use express settings" option and just blow past the choice. I don't know, most of the express settings seem to be craptacular to me, so I always go through all the "defaults" and usually find myself flipping many/most of them. But that's probably because I am not in search of automated Cortana and Bing magic page prediction goodness that auto- matically shares my name, location, and advertising ID with every random website that it possibly can (hyperbole?? maybe??) http://winaero.com/blog/windows-10-build-10074-features-a-reworked-setup-exp... Anyways, if you look on the first page of "Customize settings", yes there's an option for "Automatically connect to networks shared by my contacts" and it CAN be turned off, but it defaults to on. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how that'd work. I don't really want my "contacts" or any other data being sent to Microsoft's servers. I have my own servers that I'm reasonably happy with. I have an uneasy feeling that if set I'd find it to be slurping a lot of data over to Microsoft's servers and I guess I would not be shocked to find that 50 of my best friends on NANOG are suddenly (and unexpectedly) populating WiFi passwords at me. I suppose I could be wrong, but it's amazing how many LinkedIn invites I get from people I've never heard of, who seem to only have a mailing list in common, etc. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.