> There's a pervasive lack of precision in privacy discussions. There's a difference between a network request that does some computation on the server side, on

> There's a pervasive lack of precision in privacy discussions. There's a difference between a network request that does some computation on the server side, one that does the same but may log errors and increment counters, and one that actually stores the data temporarily or for a long time. And in the last case, there's a difference between the data being nigh-impossible for internal employees to access (perhaps only used as input for other automated systems), and data with few controls. This seems like less of a "precision" issue and more of a "transparency and accountability" issue. Do you know how long this information is stored by Microsoft? Where it is stored? Who has access? What the process is for requesting that data is deleted or even for opting-out of it's collection? An opt-in prompt is a great place for organizations to provide access to resources that answer these questions. When we don't have the answers to the questions, (or don't trust the organization providing the answers to be truthful), we should assume the worst case, not the best as you seem to be implying. > And asking the user to consent for every little thing isn't the solution either. Prompts/permission can have varying and nested levels of granularity. This is absolutely not an excuse for not providing opt-in for data collection. (Edit: E.G. You can simply ask "Allow Us to Collect Data: Always, Never, Sometimes" and then you only need to show additional prompts if they select "Sometimes". If you are seeing to many people saying "Never" then you can do a better job of explaining the benefits/features, but you can't just ethically ignore the wishes of the user.) I see no problem with organizations pre-deciding this for their employees, (thus no need for a prompt), but this doesn't remove the need for individuals and members of less organized organizations to have the ability to not have their data collected.