&gt; <i>With Windows 7&#x2F;8 you can opt to not install telemetry updates.</i><p>For now, yes. In the future that may change, just as it did when the Windows 10 update changed from &quot;optional&quot; to &quot;recommended&quot; and the installation began without user interaction.<p>When you combine that with Microsoft&#x27;s truncated support life cycle for 7 and 8.1, you end up feeling forced to move to 10 one way or another. I&#x27;m not saying that Windows 10 is a bad OS (indeed, I enjoy it on my gaming PC and my Stream 7 tablet, and it has been a huge performance boost to my wife&#x27;s PC and laptop). I&#x27;m just saying that any pretense of &quot;Microsoft would never say one thing and do another&quot; is null and void at this point.