All of our readers love Microsoft, right? Well, maybe most of you like to be away from big technology and everything that is exclusive. This is recently somewhat more difficult in Raspberry PiOS, the operating system of the Raspberry company for its boards that has made a change that the community is not particularly liking. And that change has been included without warning and by default, even in existing installations.
I, who prefer to use Manjaro ARM on my Raspberry Pi and have fled the official system for not liking it at all and for messing it up a couple of times, I found out about this news from an article published in Hot Hardware. There they explain that Raspbian has been available since 2015 2012 and that the community hadn't complained much, until now, when a recent Raspberry Pi OS update you have installed a Microsoft APT repository on all devices using the operating system.
Raspberry Pi OS has added a Microsoft repo without asking for permission
What he is not liking the least is that the repository is added automatically and without permission. The reason is a support for the Microsoft IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and Visual Studio Code (VSCode), which is not bad at first. The worst is installs even on images without user interface, and this leads to every time the "apt update" command is used, the system pings Microsoft.
User fortysix_n_2 explains that:
By having this repository, every time a Raspberry Pi OS installation is updated, a Microsoft server will be pinged. Microsoft will know that you are using Raspberry Pi OS / probable Raspberry Pi owner and your IP address. Many people try to reduce the space as much as possible, so these are three additional data points that Microsoft can use to create a profile on you.
Microsoft could monitor users
According to Reddit user Microsoft it could identify people as Raspberry Pi OS users when accessing certain services like Bing or GitHub, both owned by Microsoft, with the aim of creating a profile to display personalized advertising. Basically, this is one of the practices that Apple wants to fight with the latest versions of iOS / iPadOS or Mozilla, who include tools like their ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) or a function in Firefox 85 that separates the settings and options by web pages.
Add the repository may make sense for VSCode users, but that's something that not all of us use. And that every time the repositories are updated, our team "call Microsoft" is not the best business in the world. So much so that some users have decided to abandon Raspberry Pi OS, and no wonder.
And how do we remove it?