Can you show me where those items carry personal information about YOU? Not one of those items is used to turn around and send me ads. What's Microsoft doing with that? Making Windows better. Case in point... do you ever get "This program has performed an illegal operation. Do you want to send data to Microsoft"? That data is used to make Windows better. In fact, Microsoft learned that 80% of those errors are caused by third party applications. That data is made available to the publisher for free so they can fix things. If there was any data being sent that had personal info in it, I'd object to it being collected.

Plug in a USB drive? Information about the drive, how the system behaves, etc. is sent. Remember in XP, you had to click the USB icon in the tray before removing the drive? Then in Vista, you didn't have to do that. Why? Telemetry showed people didn't click the little icon, so Microsoft improved the experience.

Running a Modern app? Yup, you get notified of an update to the application.

I'm guessing you're running Chrome or Firefox for your browser. How do you think those applications know there's an update available? Or do you block those calls?

In the case of Google, the information they collect contains PERSONAL information and it's then used to turn around and send me ads. It is not used to make Google products better. It is used to track WHO I am, what I'm looking at, what I'm searching for, and then to push ads to me. Google's entire business model is built for pushing ads. It is not a tech company. It's an ad agency.

>>Microsoft monitoring is opt-in, not opt-out. <snip>
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>This is also such nonsense - just install Windows 7 or Windows 8 with an outbound firewall (Comodo, Eset, whatever) and just see how many calls are made to MS and not one of them ask you to opt-in or out of whatever it is they are sending back home.
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>Just insert a USB device and immediately the firewall pops up saying that something in Windows OS wants to talk to MS again - why? What does MS need to know about whatever device I insert into my laptop? And where's the opt-out ??
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>Just install any package and see how each time the installer (if InstallShield) immediately wants to contact MS.
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>Just run any Metro / Modern app and it immediately calls MS without asking me anything.
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>Just Google (sorry Bing) for "How can I opt out of Windows Customer Experience?" and see how many people are participating as a default setting without ever having been asked if they want to opt-in.
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>Smartscreen filter calls home and tells MS every package you download and are trying to install - it is on by default, not opt-in - http://log.nadim.cc/?p=78
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>Summary: Windows 8 will, by default, inform Microsoft of every app downloaded and installed by every user. This puts Microsoft in a compromising, omniscient situation where they are capable of retaining information on the application usage of all Windows 8 users, thus posing a serious privacy concern. The user is not informed of this while installing and setting up Windows 8, even though they are given the option to disable SmartScreen (which is enabled by default.)
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>You really need to drink less MS Koolaid Craig.