[zeidrich]

And I think that's the biggest issue is that Microsoft makes it pretty easy to disable them.

Most of these settings are all in the same place, right where you set up the OS.

In my opinion, none of them have to be off. I understand why they're being collected, and I don't mind that information being collected, and I like the things like the predictions as features.

But I do appreciate that they can be turned off. Another OS might just add those things but not make them something you could opt out of at all.

I mean, even Ubuntu went and sent all of your search data to Amazon by default for a while without any simple way to opt out of it, which to me is worse than Microsoft itself collecting Cortana data with the ability to turn the option off at install time.

But the thing about allowing people to choose to turn those features off (or even on) means that they're aware that they're there, while other people can just slip them in as a tiny line somewhere in the privacy policy and not allow you to configure those settings at all.