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> spies on you

Enough with this rubbish claim, please. Everyone I've asked to actually substantiate it resorts to angry handwaving. How about you?

The telemetry collects crash and feature usage data, the same as macOS and all of the phone OSes does. You want that on because it tells MS where the bugs are. If you turn it off, you don't get to complain about bugs because MS has no idea you encountered any.

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AIUI, Microsoft collects a ton of data. Apple doesn't. Apple collects crashes and some fairly basic (very anonymized) usage data, but it also asks you up-front during installation/setup whether you want to enable this kind of reporting. But from what I keep seeing people say on the internet, it sounds like Windows is constantly reporting data home to Microsoft rather than just sending crashes/bugs and other basic info.

I have no auto-telemetry activated in my OS. I've also deactivated it in my browser, Firefox, through the about:config settings. However, I am free to file a bug-report anytime I wish, as is anyone else. Referring to concerns about the contents of this telemetry as "rubbish" is every bit as potentially unreasonable as claiming to know precisely what it contains; unless you do – in which case you might provide some strong citations verifying the telemetry contents exclusively as "crash and feature usage data", and to be extra helpful, clear definitions of "feature usage" in that particular context.

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