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>This is not someone "looking in the window" this is two parties (you and the company providing some service or product to you) needing to exchange data so each can do their work properly. It's even worse. I can see the person looking through my window. I can close the blinds. At OS level I don't have that chance. I can't constantly monitor the outgoing traffic and I can't check the consequences of every update.

>Those "privacy standards" you cite that have existed for centuries... that's not a thing. It seems to be based on falsifying the history and present of how humans organize and govern systems out of ignorance. Data gathering IS the "normal". Ever thought that you and parent live in different countries with a different value for privacy? Even a "simple" thing like a census in Germany led to Constitutional Court ruling and the establishment of a new right, that of informational self-determination. And that was in the eighties and it was about a census in the form of a total survey to be carried out door-to-door by civil servants or agents of the public administration.

Now you private companies fathering more data more often than ever before. So it's worse, calling that "normal" is strange.

Trying to gather data about your product performance and use is "normal". The fact it's been always happening is also "normal". The fact you do more of it because of technology doesn't make it less normal. Is it abnormal you can shop for groceries 5 miles away with your car, because you wouldn't be able to by foot? What kind of a silly thought process is that.

Probably companies haven't been able to serve billions of individuals worldwide, so they had less data. Microsoft has more customers, and has more data to process.

No one here is describing WTF is this "data" harming them personally with. It's not personally identifiable, and it's extremely mundane. Surely Microsoft will destroy your life by having some stats on how often people in a given region play Solitaire.

So tell me how car or TV manufacturers gathered that data 40 years ago? It's neither normal nor was it always happening. It's an effect of the internet and was normally impossible before.

"The Audimeter (audience meter) was used from 1950 during the early days of television broadcasting. It attached to a television and recorded the channels viewed, onto a 16mm film cartridge that was mailed weekly to company headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, and used to generate the Nielsen Television Index. It was based on an earlier Audimeter that had been developed for the 1942 Nielsen Radio Index. Randomly selected "Nielsen families" homes were enticed to accept the Audimeter by including free TV repair service provided by TV Index reps, which was a valuable commodity when vacuum tube televisions predominated." - Wikipedia

In other words, for TV they paid a small portion of the audience to record and report their habits.

So they had to ask and pay. No problem if MS does the same. Currently they do neither.

Microsoft does ask. And it can easily adjust pricing up and then give you a discount for telemetry. But you won’t end up with more money as a result. So what did we achieve?

Consent.

These are two different things that only on surface seems to be similar. The censuses performed by governments happen every few years (should be 10 years for majority of countries, if I'm not mistaken), while telemetry gathered by software happens almost on daily basis if not all the time. Then, depending on place, census may include every adult citizen or just representative part of the population and at the same it might be compulsory for those who were selected or who are required to participate.

Telemetry involves everyone by default and it's hardly optional unless you decide to actively fight it - speaking about Microsoft Windows here. The choices offered by Microsoft doesn't offer users true control over data they gather and process; hell, that actually applies to other big companies as well - you have just the illusion you are in control of what they managed to collect about you and the vague assurances, promises that they aren't up to no good with that stuff.

Government will most likely benefit from planning its politics having the data gathered from census while Microsoft might or might not use the telemetry data and honestly, seeing what they did with Windows 10 over course of all its releases, it doesn't appear they do actually use that telemetry data for anything. They don't even bother with users, power users opinions regarding the features that are causing issues in Windows.

> This is not someone "looking in the window" this is two parties (you and the company providing some service or product to you) needing to exchange data so each can do their work properly.

The electric company probably needs to know usage for billing. Microsoft does not need any information about Windows users for the product to work. Even things like fetching updates doesn't need to leak information, although I'll grant that it's a little bit more work to avoid leaking any data.

> The electric company probably needs to know usage for billing. Microsoft does not need any information about Windows users for the product to work.

Honestly, it's amazing you can say this with a straight face? You don't think Microsoft needs to know which parts of its product crash or not, and are used or not, in order to deliver a well-working product?

I don't know if most of you here work with large-scale products, but Microsoft has no the luxury of going to every Windows user personally and asking them how's Windows and what you want more or and less of. That "conversation" happens through telemetry.

They somehow got by for years before telemetry was an option; the answer is mostly testing, focus groups, and user studies, along with intentionally-provided bug reports.

None of what you say replaces telemetry, it's an addition to it. And the question remains why we need to willfully ignore the Internet, and do things like in the 80s. What's the purpose of this idiocy?

> You don't think Microsoft needs to know which parts of its product crash or not, and are used or not, in order to deliver a well-working product? How about asking the user and testing before delivery of the product? MS outsourced the test to the users and enforces a feedback for their faults. Imagine doing the same 40 years ago. A company employees enters your home to gather data about faulty products. You do know how many private data is stored on PCs and smartphones? Do you know what people access this data?

Isn't that what the insider community was meant to be for? Getting cool new stuff in exchange for data and performance stats collection.

Just taking it from everyone without offering the ability to turn it off is very poor practice imo. I understand they want this data to improve stuff but I should have the ability to not contribute to it.