And this is why the future of Windows is irrelevant

<blockquote><a href="#258638"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p><em>If EU countries place personal privacy above what some online service providers may view as greater efficiency,</em></p><p><em>If the EU is resolute about remaining in the 1990s vis-a-vis online services, the rest of the world may let them.</em></p><p>I would say it is the other way round. The EU rules are new and specifically brought in to try and deal with the modern world. The EU philosophises, that the data about you is YOUR data and it belongs to you, or at least you have a right to know about it and decide what happens with it.</p><p>That means that companies cannot collect and sell your personal data without your explicit permission – and the T&amp;Cs of most online social media companies, for example, don't hold water in Europe. It is illegal for Facebook or Google, for example, to sell your profile to third parties or let third parties see it, which is the biggest part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at the moment, 750,000 people <em>did</em> say that CA could look at their data, the other 49,250,000 people, whose data was "stolen" <em>did not</em> give their permission to Facebook to hand over that data. That is illegal under EU law.</p><p>WhatsApp takes all of your contacts' data and copies it into WhatsApps cloud and, outside the EU, they share it with Facebook. In the EU, part of the stipulation for the purchase of WhatsApp was that that data would remain separated and Facebook would never be able to see it. Facebook have reassured the EU that this is the case, but nobody has any insight into how WhatsApp and Facebook deal with the data. The problem is, WhatsApp cannot legally load up your data into their cloud without the explicit written permission of <em>every</em> contact in your contact list. They can argument, that people who already use WhatsApp have agreed to this, but that still leaves the other 90% of contacts in your contact list who are not WhatsApp users and who haven't given their permission. That means the user of the app is, theoretically, liable to prosecution for breaching data protection laws. Signal, Threema and other similar apps get around this by not uploading your contacts lists, at "worst" they upload a hash of the phone number and compare it to the hashes of registered users, give back a list of contacts and delete those uploaded hashes from memory.</p><p>This is different to online, personal contact lists, like GMail, Outlook.com etc. They sit in a quasi legal position, as long as the data is not shared with the provider or third parties and the data is held either within the EU or in countries with equivalent data protection laws or agreements with the EU. The USA has the Privacy Shield agreement, for example, which should ensure the data is held to EU standards, not handed over to third parties and only passed on to law enforcement with a valid EU warrant; except that the USA last week put through two new laws that pretty much negate Privacy Shield and make Google Docs, GMail, Outlook.com Office 365, Apple's iCloud and any other cloud service with a prensence in the USA (whether that be a headquarters or just a branch office or a single server) quasi illegal to use in Europe, because you cannot guarantee that the FBI won't turn up at Google's (or whoever's) door and force them to hand over the data without an EU warrant. If they did that, the "owner" of the data, the citizen or company in Europe, whose account has been plundered, is legally liable for a breach of the Data Protection laws and could face fines in excess of 20 million Euros.</p><p>Does the cloud bring enough benefit to face the bad press and fines of 20 million Euros or 5% of annual turnover, whichever is the greater?</p><p><br></p>

<blockquote><a href="#258824"><em>In reply to skane2600:</em></a></blockquote><p>At the moment the data protection commissioner has just said that using it is a breach of DP law, if you let it upload your contacts.</p><p>That said, you aren't European, so it is probably ok. It also hasn't been brought before a court, so it is just theoretical at this point.</p><p>Alternatively think about using Signal or Threema. Signal is the underlying protocol for WhatsApp and is open source.</p>

<blockquote><a href="#258635"><em>In reply to hrlngrv:</em></a></blockquote><p>We use Intel NUCs at work, with dual 24" monitors or 4K monitors, using PXE-Boot to launch a base GNU/Linux image with X installed, but no applications, it then attaches to the Linux terminal server in the computer room.</p><p>There are a few jobs that can be done from a phone or tablet sized device – stall management at a slaughter house, for example, for keeping track of the time animals have been there, have they received their last feed? Are they rested? Do they have any injuries? And other legally required animal welfare information. Sales representatives can use them for showing off products in multimedia catalogues and take orders and post them to the corporate ERP system on the move, this is easier than doing it with a laptop.</p><p>On the other hand, most office workers have a permanent workspace and that is decked out with monitor(s), a decent keyboard and mouse and either a docking station for a laptop or a desktop PC or thin client. At the current time, the smartphone more-or-less replaces a thinclient when attached to that dock (due to processing power and legacy applications). Only the thin client is a lot cheaper to provide to hundreds of users than a corporate smartphone with the relevant security profile and is more easily managed (the user can't load anything on it, if they tried). They then log onto the locked down corporate desktop, running on some server somewhere.</p><p>For mobile workers, who have to be in contact all the time, that is a different matter. They usually need a smartphone and a laptop.</p>