Windows 7 Update for Windows 10 Upgrade Could Be Spying on You

A Windows 7 update, meant to prepare the operating system for a Windows 10 upgrade, could be secretly triggering daily telemetry and sending that information back to Microsoft. The update, KB 2952664, is advertised as a “compatibility update for upgrading Windows 7” that helps Microsoft make improvements to the current operating system in order to ease the upgrade experience to the latest version of Windows,” the update could be spiking a red-line of one CPU core each time Windows 7 is initialised, InfoWorld has revealed.

After a tipoff from a reader, staff at InfoWorld began investigating KB 2952664. The update was installed on a fresh Windows 7 SP1 x64 computer, after which a new program was found in the Windows Task Scheduler named DoScheduledTelemetryRun. You can look for it yourself in Task Scheduler Library>Microsoft>Windows>Application Experience, listed to run at 3:00am every day. The task it runs is %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe appraiser.dll,DoScheduledTelemetryRun, which is described as “Collects program telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program.” The program runs independent of whether opts in or out of Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).

Is this scheduled telemetry run secretly snooping on Windows 7 users, or is this suspicious-looking process more innocent than it seem? Until Microsoft clarifies the situation, we can’t be sure.

Thank you InfoWorld for providing us with this information.