Are you seriously blaming a company for resetting something that most users use crippled privacy tools which people never knew that it uses unsupported, and undocumented registry keys which aren't migrated with major OS builds of Windows 10? Not surprising at all, and this whole unsupported, and undocumented registry keys has always worked this way for decades. Why are people learning about this just now? Heck - even Microsoft employees have to keep creating registry keys (especially on daily builds) every once in a while because of our IT department, CSEO, whose name was previously called MSIT, that shoves down useless group policies and registry keys at our throat.

Never have I ever seen that sort of issue happen on my end because I've always used clean official ISOs than using poorly made converters available on the internet. How about do exactly what I've done and then report back?

That's complete bullst. I know that isn't true because I (partially) worked on the telemetry system - you're literally arguing with someone who has knowledge on how telemetry is all utilized in the real world. It sounds as if you've never used Diagnostic Data Viewer to check the data for yourself and spewing out random crap here that doesn't make much sense.

You can build your own tools to mimick Diagnostic Data Viewer's output and you'll still receive the exact same data. There's nothing about Diagnostic Data Viewer that has "cherry picked" data or "incomplete" data. It's accurate, and in real-time. There's nothing wrong with that.

All of the telemetry data that's collected goes through an extensive review process, and that includes Microsoft's Speech recognition. Anything personal identifying information is permanently removed from the servers if found at all.

Microsoft has always been transparent about telemetry, and privacy ever since Satya took over Microsoft, and my point still stands, even today and have been since the RS2 (Insider) development of Windows. So what part of (telemetry and privacy) transparency you don't understand? We have our own official scripts (available on Microsoft Docs) to turn off various endpoints if you think a particular domain is invading your privacy rather than using poorly made "tools" to hose your operating system. The Microsoft Edge team has its own documentation on what's being collected too and that has been posted to Microsoft Docs, though for other products it's posted somewhere else. Any particular reason why you need an opt out button on a local account on a consumer edition of Windows when it's literally not PII and is meant to keep your your device secure? If you connected your Microsoft account to your PC then you can clear out everything off from the servers.

All Microsoft applications' and services' telemetry are heavily tied into the DiagTrack service. If you've used Insider builds - you'll see a change in Manganese (196xx) builds that'll now allow you to permanently disable telemetry with a simple switch on Enterprise, Education, and Server. Why was this changes made? Because of all of this privacy controversy surrounding Windows 10 that are currently floating around the internet.

It's still quite ironic and unbelievable that people who care about privacy and think that it's all "spying" use social media or anything else online to begin with.

There's a reason why A/B testing exists and not having one defeats the purpose of the Windows Insider Program. Gabe Aul never envisioned the Windows Insider Program to be "to just test features." it has always been to "send feedback and help us make a better product." A/B testing is a mechanism to study an impact of a change, and there's quite a lot of features in development for Windows. Did you know that there are different variations of Start Menu, and other features? How will that all be tested without A/B testing on the same codebase with real-time monitoring? You can't - isolating changes without A/B testing is near impossible, even for Google with such a large userbase. Data becomes more or less useless without it because of the amount of times the metrics change from time to time, and each version or build of Windows contains a lot of changes, especially under the hood. If you think that everything is possible, then why not join Microsoft and come and help us? You seem "smart."

A skeleton crew of (QA) testers for Windows has always existed. I'm not sure exactly where you got that statement from, but the role that got killed off was SDET and not STE. There's a big difference for both of them: SDETs were responsible for writing (code) unit tests and were never even responsible for testing the UX/UI of Windows, whereas, STEs were responible for the testing the UX/UI of Windows. We still had a quality org for Windows even after that role killing and merging (SDET's job responsibilities into SDE) happened.

We don't care about GDPR anymore? What - where did you get that from? We do care, and I'm not sure what your evidence is here that supports "we don't care about GDPR at all." Even for our Microsoft employees in Europe, telemetry is completely opt out (and we've done that by law) for internal builds of products, and those using our corporate network, and outside of EU, that's a completely different story.

Now, you're part of the problem here, because you're building poorly built "tools" to remove all of that which can be done by no scripts at all by uninstalling them straight from the Start Menu. No wonder why people are using such poorly built "tools" such as online package removal, "bloatware" removal, etc. and hosing their own operating systems and making it unsecure and unpatched. Do you know the amount of times people have to talk to SwiftOnSecurity about it? Yeah, I'll let you think about that. It's hundreds of complaints per month, and SwiftOnSecurity is an MVP that has a very, very close connection with Microsoft.

The offensive part here is your assumption that we can "unanonymize" data and use it to do whatever and not care about what's going on. We've put quite a lot of effort to operate ethically, and create a product that we're all happy to use. If we didn't follow GDPR laws properly, we would've been bankrupt by now despite earning billions of dollars per year company-wide. Yes, you heard that straight: billions of dollars per year, billions of dollars per year.

The intrusive parts of Microsoft Edge is something we've zero, zero control over. That decision was made by the marketing team to make the numbers, both market share and the amount of people using it monthly, look good. The Microsoft Edge team who develops the application on a daily to day basis doesn't like it either, we've tried convincing the marketing team about it and it was simply ignored, and I'm not sure what you want me to do? Do I look like Satya Nadella to you? You can hear Missy's own complaints about that on Reddit. Not sure who she is - have you been living under the rock lately?

Now - you know what else is transparent? My passion: DMCA (alongside my partnership with the CELA team). I'm sure the administrator of this forum (@Yen) will be notified about that in the future (and that'll happen sooner rather than later once I get around that). I'm quite strict as to what (Microsoft) tools should be allowed on the internet or not. It's neither censorship or anything new as majority of those "useful" tools are EULA breaking. Oh wait - didn't someone here say that we now focus on taking legal action on business? I don't believe there was a Microsoft employee on this forums before, but now I'm on a full-time role (as said previously) and therefore have the privileges to partner up with teams and act of my behalf to issue legal DMCA claims. Remember back when r/piracy was temporarily shutdown because of the tens or hundreds of DMCA claims and the Reddit CEO had to act on it?