[Lendal]

Microsoft has watched Apple get away with this stuff for years and make billions off of it. Apple doesn't even offer an opt-out on most of it. Microsoft is at a massive competitive disadvantage by not leveraging the knowledge it has access to and offering those features that require this type of data collection. Microsoft is a publicly-held company, beholden to its shareholders and is thereby required to compete in the market against its rivals. As long as Apple is allowed to do it, it is therefore inevitable that everyone else will, too. Preschool logic? Sure, whatever you want to call it. It's life.

[krisdol]

Apple is not an advertising company, its a hardware company. While I feel it's going down the same route as Google, its current privacy policies are significantly better than any of its competitors. Furthermore, Windows 10 goes way beyond the norms by having permission to gather keystrokes and content from private and public files, and it doesn't allow disabling some of its privacy-violating features unless you purchase the enterprise edition. MS has turned the advertising-heavy Google Play experience into a desktop OS, and they're the first to do so, hence the criticism.