The ubiquitous Google is not a search engine company, it's an advertising company. They changed the world and made it possible to be hugely profitable based on indirect selling to consumers and taking a portion of the Ad revenue. They're the ultimate middleman with a potential sale made on any one of the 3.5 billion daily searches.

Even Apple, the most valuable brand in the world have extended their range from just being a hardware vendor as they now take over 50% percent of all mobile advertising revenue. Long gone are the days where a customer bought a piece of hardware/software and that was the last chance the company had to make money from us as a consumer.

So, When a company (such as Microsoft) invests huge amounts of money into a product and then gives it away should we be at all surprised that actually, they're not doing it to be nice. Rather, they're doing it to stay competitive and because it fits in with their long term strategy, which unsurprisingly has something to do with profit.

Some quarters might say that Microsoft are no-longer the only big kid in the playground. They now occupy a space far more crowded than it ever was and competition between the big 3 is still evolving. To stay alive, they need to compete and not on the battlefields that they used to own, but in the space where all the other tech-giants inhabit. This world is a data-filled, real-time, transaction-based, analytics-fuelled, targetted-marketing, multi-headed bohemouth and above all practically invisible to the public. After all, if the customer isn't (directly) paying for the service, then it's free, right?

So when installing the new Windows 10 I wasn't at all suprised to see an installation option with 'Express Settings'. Clearly the designers want Joe Public to just hit 'next, next, next, finish' and opt for these factory defaults. But, as you might expect, these defaults will attempt to send every scrap of information to the big data dump in the sky for Microsoft and whomever their trusted third parties happen to be. To be honest with you, I'm not keen on that. So, as is my want, I dialled everything back down to a more acceptable level of privacy (read, turned everything off) and I moved on to the busy work that required me to fire my PC up at 7am on a Sunday.

This is the world we live in: where so much of the first world experience is paid for by advertising.

But surely as long as consumers expect that systems are going to be geared towards favouring the advertisers and we read what's on screen before we go through the 'next, next, next, finish' cycle we can help to make it a tad more difficult for them to do their job. As far as I can tell, having to reign back the default settings for Windows 10 are no different than having to un-check the 'Yes, please download the Yahoo toolbar' from so much of the software I downloaded in the last 10 years.

The game hasn't changed, it's just the way that it's played has: It's still about making money, directly or otherwise. Whenever any new application is downloaded, are we 100% sure that we know what data is being streamed back to the big giant cloud of personally identifiable information? At least Microsoft are telling us what information they're after, it just so happens that the Express Settings want most of it.

A company has just as much right as anyone else to ask each of us a question, it's just up to each of us to choose how we answer.

At the end of the day, it is up to us, the users of these systems to pay attention to what we're transmitting and to whom.

If we do not place any value on our privacy, and don't bother to investigate what questions a company is asking, then surely we don't care if those questions are answered on our behalf.

And I think that's what the Express Settings are counting on.

Right, I'm off to Crush some Candy.