[andrepd]

>The collection doesn't do you any harm

This kind of thinking sickens me. So you would be fine with me rampaging through your room and your house looking over your stuff, making a catalog of the things you own, the things you buy, what you do with them, at what hours, and how often, watching you eat, work, play, sleep, be with your friends, taking notes on who you speak to, at what hours, and about what...

Since, as you say, this doesn't do you any harm?

[partiallypro]

The collection Microsoft does is nothing like that, it's literally things like "did this users use the action center" or not. In Cortana it tracks your search, JUST like Google Now/Siri. It's not going through your documents or personal stuff at all. It's not even on the NSA level meta data, which I do have a problem with. It honestly sounds like you don't even know what it's tracking at all. Your analogy makes 0 sense at all. You might as well claim that "heat mapping" on websites is akin to rummaging through your trash.