[Zelizz]

I work on Windows (speaking informally here, these are my own opinions and not those of my employer, etc.)

We care a lot about GDPR and privacy, and there's been a big top-down push to reduce the amount of telemetry collected, including giving good justifications for anything we want to keep collecting. We have to make sure all the data is kept in GDPR-compliant systems that can handle the deletion and security policies, and we regularly take training to tell us what is and isn't compliant use of customer data. My team uses it mostly for seeing the success rate of our feature across different hardware, firmware and OS versions, which helps us identify issues and poke certain partners to improve ecosystem reliability. I can't speak for the Edge/Bing/Whatever teams, but I'd hope they take it as seriously as us.

I definitely wish users had more control over data collection without resorting to group policy, and I wish users had more visibility and control over more of the OS in general, but I feel we've learned the wrong lessons from Apple so everything must be unconfigurable and only give vague feedback like, "Something is happening..." (but I digress). In terms of caring about privacy I'd still give Apple the crown, but I don't think it'd be unfair to give Microsoft second place.

[ocdtrekkie]

I think the issue that people still have with Microsoft's telemetry approach, is that I'm generally happy to forward error messages or logs or whatever, but I don't like the agency to not do that taken away from me. I get that default-enabled and non-disableable telemetry provides better statistics, but that can't be worth the cost of what Microsoft did, which was take all of the goodwill they'd recently built up and light it on fire.

As you aren't management, I get that you can't really do much to impact that. But I think the idea that "seeing the success rate of our feature" can't possibly be worth the risks and harm to goodwill and trust that Microsoft's telemetry approach took.

Side note "Something happened" as an error message when trying to upgrade Windows 10 is my favorite go-to example of bad error messages. It didn't even give you the paradoxical 0x80000000 error code that you had to use a search engine to figure out what meant. It was just a notice that something went wrong.

[animalnewbie]

I appreciate telemetry. Just give me my taskbar and start menu junplists back.