&gt; <i>Most of the privacy settings that people are most worried about is tied into Cortana or more specifically what you allow Cortana to do on your behalf</i><p>In all of these discussions on HN, the only ones bringing up &quot;worries&quot; about Cortana features have been people defending Windows 10 (and now Windows 8 and 7) data collection. It&#x27;s easy to disable and, if you choose not to use it, it won&#x27;t collect data anyways. The same can&#x27;t be said of telemetry.<p>&gt; <i>Which tells them when you launch a Windows 10 &quot;app&quot; and some basic computer information</i><p>Actually it&#x27;s not clear what else is being collected, because Microsoft won&#x27;t disclose what&#x27;s being collected. Is there evidence that only data about usage of Windows store apps is being collected?<p>&gt; <i>But even without that setting&#x2F;ability the apps themselves could conduct the same reporting</i><p>Which would be needed to take into account when deciding on if that app should be used. Just to be clear, that means the application I choose to run might be collecting analytics, but my OS is also collecting analytics on the applications I&#x27;m choosing to run because it thinks it should.<p>&gt; <i>Nobody can actually point to exactly what specific information Microsoft is even taking</i><p>Yes, because Microsoft won&#x27;t tell anyone what it&#x27;s collecting!<p>&gt; <i>and have even less data yet still to back up any claims</i><p>As a baseline, you yourself talked about how we know they&#x27;re collecting information about application usage. That right there is undesirable behavior for many that we have plenty of evidence for.