> Both Ubuntu and Mac OS X are much better at privacy today compared to Windows 10. Windows has reached Android-level data gathering capacity.

Could you be more specific about the concern though? I actually don't see what MS is doing that other competitors are, from a practical perspective. I'll try to be very specific as well. I've done some research here and this is what I've observed:

1. Individual apps in Windows send back telemetry commensurate with other apps I've got on OSX. They send back usage data that includes my activity. This used to be a very web-specific thing, then it was a mobile-specific thing, but I think most app store apps I have now open connections to a telemetry collector like Mixpanel or Kahuna. This used to be unusual, but now is the norm for every commercial app, and as someone building and managing said apps all I can say is "people want this stuff so good and so cheaply now, I don't know how else we could possibly get the data we need to deliver it that cheaply."

2. Win10 even at rest seems to send back very tiny amounts of data as part of its update checks and general telemetry. This seems really really similar to what OSX is doing, but of course I'm eager to see a security researcher break into this data. I'm sure there is slightly more to it. But people are shocked that Microsoft can discuss Edge hours used and pages viewed, and I think literally every competently executed application could produce those figures in 2016. To be honest, I trust Microsoft with this data more than I do tiny ISVs just using canned products outside their sphere of expertise to manage updates and analytics.

3. I think the "keylogger" people discuss is something nearly every OS does by default on its search engines and something every browser does as well: do debounced as you type pre-queries on search items. It's measurably more invasive with Spotlight or Cortana because you might be searching for indexed file content. I'm unaware of what else people might be discussing and I can't find many relevant alternative culprits here.

I don't disagree MS could be more obvious with its intentions on Win10. What's most frustrating is that from a consumer and even developer standpoint, Win10 is rapidly emerging as the best of all worlds for developers. The next major edition (which most of us are running via fast/slow rings) and the current iterations of MS-first-party hardware are directly competitive with Apple's offerings, and hardware wise they're quite good now.

So we're left in this awkward space where Apple has really dropped the ball on progressing their OS and they're profoundly developer unfriendly and even quite exploitative, Linux is still all but unusable on modern mobile and portable hardware without substantial commercial work layered on top, and Win10 is delivering a really functional environment with support for Linux that is done in FreeBSD's excellent style of direct compatibility.

It might make more sense for us to treat analytics collection like we would with ads via Adblocker. There's probably a massive addressible market if that's not already a product. Windows actually has fantastic and sophisticated per-application permissions controls that could be automated here...