Quote:
Sign into Windows with your Microsoft account and the operating system immediately syncs settings and data to the company’s servers. That includes your browser history, favorites and the websites you currently have open as well as saved app, website and mobile hotspot passwords and Wi-Fi network names and passwords.
Well, yeah. So all the same kind of stuff that other browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) do and mobile OSs do. It's bog standard backup functionality that other companies have been doing for years because people want it; it's arguably only odd that it's taken MS this long to implement it.
Quote:
To enable Cortana to provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions, Microsoft collects and uses various types of data, such as your device location, data from your calendar, the apps you use, data from your emails and text messages, who you call, your contacts and how often you interact with them on your device.
Cortana also learns about you by collecting data about how you use your device and other Microsoft services, such as your music, alarm settings, whether the lock screen is on, what you view and purchase, your browse and Bing search history, and more.”
As the article itself acknowledges, Cortana can only work if it collects this data so it's a functional necessity, not some kind of conspiracy theory or a 'freemium' feature or whatever. Also, again, it's what Google Now and Siri already do.
Quote:
Windows 10 generates a unique advertising ID for each user on each device. That can be used by developers and ad networks to profile you. Again, you can turn this off in settings, but you need to know where to look
This does seems a bit weird. I understand browsers doing it in response to website creating cookies but to bake it into the OS itself does seem unnecessary. I assume though in practise it's little different from the cookie collection you're going to accrue as soon as you hit the internet on a new browser so I don't know that I'm that bothered.