I prefer the "old evil" MS. At least they weren't so eager to participate in massive surveillance of their users, unlike the "new" MS.
The sense I've gotten is that Microsoft of the time really did have a very libertarian core thought process that wasn't really into spying on it's users.
I think this sense is mistaken. Microsoft has always been pretty hostile to users and not so keen on things like user rights. Their customers were (and still are) businesses.
Yes, there can be benefits to diagnostics, but then you failed to acknowledge what this data collection is about.