If you write software on Windows, Microsoft may already have copies of programs you never released.
Developer Garrett Stimpson wrote on 11 November that Microsoft Defender’s “Automatic sample submission” uploaded 217 files from his PC over three months, going by Defender’s own event log. Of those, 201 were builds of the same Go test program. A Python script went too, in August, straight out of his Recycle Bin. “I hadn’t seen a prompt for any of them,” he writes.
He wasn’t looking for it. While chasing a slow connection with Hodometer, a traffic monitor he built himself, he saw MpCmdRun.exe, Defender’s command-line tool, send 224 MB to Microsoft’s Azure storage in a single day.
Source: Privacy Affairs · 2026-11-12