Microsoft accused of adding spy features to Windows 7, 8
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it appears that little or no traffic gets sent.
So unless you opt in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program, none of this is meaningful. Windows 7 or 8 is not "spying" on you any more than Windows 10 is.
Windows 10 has been accused of a lot, but every time you dig into the accusations you come up with nothing. Nobody has been able to pin one actual issue on Windows 10 yet, but not for lack of trying.
This all started because Microsoft had extremely aggressive metrics built into the beta of 10, and then made the mistake of actually giving people all of their privacy settings in one singular place (instead of distributing them all over the OS like in 8 and prior).
If you ignore Cortana and associated privacy settings, very little has changed in 10.
Apparently there's some extra 'user experience' data gathering which must also be adjusted in the privacy settings as you say. These will also be installed on win7 and 8. I have my updates set on critical only and they haven't been installed and I don't expect they will be.
I've had to change update settings after downloading from the microsoft site. They changed them to 'treat suggested updates as critical' and then it downloaded all the win10 update stuff. I ended up reinstalling cause I because it installed about 60 or 70 things and my machine was acting strangely. I'll have to keep a close watch on the settings.
I think the fear for me is not so much that Microsoft has access to my machine and data. It's that this access is written in and can be exploited and Microsoft has sat on its thumbs regarding security issues before. Also it makes you have to trust how they treat your data whether they encrypt or make it anonymous etc.
For these reasons and that Microsoft may be shifting toward a 'paid service or ads punishment' type of service, I'm currently looking at PCBSD.