&gt; You can simply choose not to use Cortana or to disable it entirely. Google Now &amp; Siri support the same functionality but ironically don&#x27;t give you the settings to disable it, so nobody bats an eyelid.<p>Siri can be disabled. Location tracking to improve contextual understanding can be disabled separately if you don&#x27;t want to disable Siri completely. If you disable Siri, all data is deleted. You&#x27;re also informed of exactly what data is uploaded.<p>&gt; Beyond that you only really have so called &quot;basic telemetry.&quot; Which tells them when you launch a Windows 10 &quot;app&quot; and some basic computer information. But even without that setting&#x2F;ability the apps themselves could conduct the same reporting (via direct HTTP requests), the only reason it is even a setting is because Microsoft unified it to make developers lives easier and to better aggregate the information their side.<p>Does Microsoft let you disable this? Apple offers you a prompt like this one <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;aBzTNsV" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;aBzTNsV</a> on every major (x.y) update, and shows you what data is being uploaded (as well as letting you disable it) in settings.