(giving insight, not speaking for Microsoft here) Internally we take privacy policy seriously. If you agreed to the policy, we're only using the data the way t

(giving insight, not speaking for Microsoft here) Internally we take privacy policy seriously. If you agreed to the policy, we're only using the data the way the policy says. (GDPR "keeps us honest", but there's actually internal drive for this. Microsoft Runs On Trust.) So autocomplete? seriously only used for autocomplete. same with inking and typing, it is only used for improvements to the inking and typing systems. smartscreen does exactly what it says on the tin. That data's not used for anything but malicious website detection. It's first line of defense against phishing in a lot of orgs. (systemwide Ad ID mirrors the feature on Apple and Android products. check the windows API for exactly what you get out of this. It's probably less than you think) cortana is... a bit of a misbranding, to be honest. It's MS's answer to IBM's "watson", in that pretty much every consumer-facing AI product gets Cortana branding whether it makes sense or not. Note the privacy policy here, we can use the Cortana data more freely. Don't agree unless you agree. Cloud-based is getting inserted into everything because users don't upgrade. We had to push an Office 2007 patch recently. 2007. It'd have its first crush by now. Disregarding the ability for the above to be stolen (and that'd be impressive, MSIT is top-tier), your personal data is being used for exactly the purpose we say it's being used for. While your personal incentives may not align, our business incentives are "get you on the cloud, get your software working well, get easy data transfer between MS products, make sure you're patched and updated, take your money for this". It's not a secret. It's not a conspiracy. It's time-limited software licensing and cloud services.