You use enough Google products, from Google search to others, Google knows who you are, Google knows what you like.
The big picture here is that we know how to block (a lot of) Microsoft phoning home stuff, but the people who scream the loudest against privacy intrusions are
blissfully unaware what Google knows about them though invasion of privacy by Google...
They are both bad, but steps could have been taken by Microsoft to reduce the
perception that they are somehow worse than Google.
They are both bad [as far as your privacy goes] but it's amateur hour in Redmond in comparison to what Google has been doing to us for a very long time *without* anyone on the forums here screaming against Google, because they don't realize what Google has been doing.
Microsoft attracted all this negative attention to itself by putting a padlock on options. That started this circle of hate against them.
If they just included hard to get to options, we wouldn't be talking about them. We would just switch it off, and be in the
tiny minority of users who do so.
But they locked it up. So it serves them well for doing it that: everyone now thinks they're a privacy-invading monster, bigger than Google. In 2017, even the computer illiterate average users think so.