&gt;If you ignore Cortana and associated privacy settings, very little has changed in 10.<p>Apparently there&#x27;s some extra &#x27;user experience&#x27; 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&#x27;t been installed and I don&#x27;t expect they will be.<p>I&#x27;ve had to change update settings after downloading from the microsoft site. They changed them to &#x27;treat suggested updates as critical&#x27; 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&#x27;ll have to keep a close watch on the settings.<p>I think the fear for me is not so much that Microsoft has access to my machine and data. It&#x27;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.<p>For these reasons and that Microsoft may be shifting toward a &#x27;paid service or ads punishment&#x27; type of service, I&#x27;m currently looking at PCBSD.