[KirinDave]

As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

For clarity, they captured the extremely detailed telemetry from their test devices. Most of the telemetry that Microsoft ships back to the mothership is the exact kind of telemetry that apps from the Apple Store, iOS Store, Android Store and Chrome Web Store submit: app specific telemetry. Many of these include signals that help understand battery life impact, so every major application platform (including the web) is doing this.

That stuff–stuff you agree to in the EULA as it stands– is absolutely essential to improving app experience to the standards of the market. The reason the mobile ecosystem has developed so fast (and that the web ecosystem can develop so fast) is a whole lot of telemetry on user usage patterns, habits, device failures, device selection, etc.

I'm not sure why it's so controversial. Even the Ubuntu store apps can administer telemetry.

If you'd like to complain about the pervasive surveillance state in your national scale, there are more fruitful avenues.

[megablast]

> As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

This is not true at all. And there is a difference between your smartphone and your laptop, even if you can't see it.

[MikeHolman]

Yes, telemetry from my smartphone is even more invasive to my privacy, having my location at all times, as well as being the single location with all my communications.

[KirinDave]

Just one of many links on Google for an appropriate search string. This one is dated and no longer accurate, but the phenomenon still occurs.

http://lifehacker.com/lets-talk-about-apples-privacy-issues-...

They have and they do, on every device. And that's ignoring app specific telemetry, which is explicitly allowed on all app stores.

It is one thing to not want to share that data. It's another entirely to invoke a 7+ year old corporate culture as evidence Microsoft is the sole "bad" actor in the space when every vendor openly discusses their telemetry collection.

How much did we hear about Chrome telemetry at I/O and PWAS? A lot. More to come. And it's necessary to make software products affordable o produce, unfortunately.