I still can&#x27;t imagine why Microsoft would think it&#x27;s worth the bad publicity to <i>not</i> offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10).<p>They&#x27;ve been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they&#x27;ve been doing lately. It just seems downright foolish to squander all of that for a few extra basis points in their telemetry data from those rare few users who care about privacy but are forced to use Windows 10 anyways for whatever reason.<p>Those who care about privacy but do have a choice in OS will simply avoid Windows 10 altogether because of the mandatory telemetry, which is telemetry data that they wouldn&#x27;t be getting anyways. A certain percentage of these people could be Windows 10 users if it weren&#x27;t for the mandatory telemetry. Would they really rather have people using other OSes, than having them use Windows 10 without giving them telemetry data?<p>So many aspects of their position on this issue seems completely irrational to me.