How? By constantly downloading the entire database of every application to your local drive? Where it would not only take up space, but could be modified to allow anything in? The author says nothing about _what_ exactly is being sent to MS, all he can say for sure that a request is sent to that URL. And about it being turned on by default - as long as it can be turned off, this is _good_. The main problem with security features (like Windows Update for a long time) that are not turned on by default is that your regular Joe user will never turn those on, thus ending up with a terribly out of date, insecure system.