[hdjjhhvvhga]

> I get what you're saying but this is one of those things that just doesn't work when it's opt-in.

So be it. We have had many operating systems without telemetry at all. If this is the will of users, they should respect it. Instead, you get two buttons: (1) give us everything, (2) give us the things we care about most. There is no third option "give us nothing" so people are downloading third party packages from various sources just to block that, possibly breaking parts of their system. And then MS changes things so it becomes an even worse mess. This is the very definition of being user-hostile - just because they can.

[md8z]

What is missing here is that no other method to collect feedback and product analytics has been proposed. It is impossible to make decisions at a company the size of Microsoft without that type of information. All the larger companies are doing it for this reason. Opt-out telemetry is the easiest and cheapest way to get it. Most Linux desktops don't have to deal with the problem because they aren't that big, and the operating systems that didn't have it at all were built for a different era. You're framing this as something being about the will of the users or being "user-hostile" vs not, but that's honestly not important here, this is a very real technical problem. Overwhelmingly it seems that Windows users (and some Linux users, definitely Android users if you count those as "Linux") are fine with the current state of things.

In some places it seems that people did care, for example the GDPR is a step in the right direction, but there seems to be about zero political will to do anything like that in the United States. And even that doesn't really change the state of telemetry in Windows that much.