[Silhouette]

But seeing some of the responses here you'd think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your entire desktop with no way to disable it.

I once asked, seriously, whether there was any guarantee that enabling telemetry in a Microsoft developer product would not result in sending code we were working on back to Microsoft, inadvertently or otherwise. No-one could give me a clear confirmation that it would not. The responses were about 20% "we trust Microsoft, they'd obviously never do this" and about 80% silent downvotes.

If my business could be facing considerable damages for violating confidentiality agreements if something like that ever happened and sensitive information did leak, that's just not a convincing response. Microsoft have been pushing mandatory telemetry, mandatory and automatically deployed user-hostile updates and radical changes in data usage like GitHub Copilot. You'd have to be crazy to give them any benefit of the doubt in this area now. If they want phone-home on and they promise they're not going to take anything they shouldn't, we want to see the technical measures and legally actionable documentation to back that up.