My understanding is that a lot can be gleaned from just internet traffic, but I'm ashamed to say I did not even consider the off-line activity.
I must say that at the risk of being construed as a paranoiac, I am suspicious of VPN's as they are likely to be interlocked/strawman owners with the big ISP's. Comcast throttles your Netflix because you won't buy "TV" from them, thereby creating a business model "solution" that is a workaround?
I've been using SpyBot Anti-Beacon for a long time now, does this really work?
I still get targeted advertisements on YT and in email spam.
Observation: Nothing short of someone breaking into or cracking into Microsoft, stealing the source code, commenting out the telemetry, and releasing the cracked version to the masses is going to stop Microsoft's spying.
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install gentoo
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So if you register windows 10 and use a VPN them it will call home and identify you as using that iP. I know where Id send a warrant if you were using a VPN.
That's not what anti-beacon is for. It attempts to stop Windows telemetry, stop Windows phoning get home. It's not an adblocker.
What I mean by targeted ads are advertisements that are selected based on intelligence gathered by telemetry.
For example, I've just started to plan a trip to the mountains in New England. I have in the past an avid interest in hiking, camping in tents, fishing and hunting, boating, etc. All of a sudden, I get deluged with web-ads, spam email, popups, from sporting goods chains, and outdoor gear websites.
The source code has been shared with various government and private entities on occasion and it has even been leaked (at least for old versions) but the problem as I understand it is building the source code even if you had it as the systems for doing that are proprietary and obfuscated.
Yes, building is hard, but if we had the source code, we would know how to defeat the telemetry without the need for rebuilding the OS.
Just switch to linux best answer to the problem?
Switch to linux and run only open source software, learn how to compile source code from any windows program you use, is what I am going to do from now on.
I just rolled a new win10 iso last night with ntlite; proceeding selecting "I have no license" disallows some options. Regardless, it seems fairly extensive. Well, maybe not extensive. Granular for sure, though. The telemetry options don't have a completely disabled setting, but it does have limits which it mentions are default for home, pro, and enterprise versions.
I haven't had a chance to run it yet. I just wanted a lightweight version to run in a VM for some Windows-only services on an old Linux server. I was able to hock most of the apps, which you can do on an already installed win10, but this lets you do it by default.
I also blocked all the telemetry in dd-wrt anyway, so that was the easy part. Took 5 minutes.
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Windows 10 Education here. Security option wasn't available via Group Policy editor(only 1-3), but managed to force it via regiedit (changed Allow Telemetry value to 0). I honestly have no clue if it did anything other than tick the box over to "Security", but if someone has a way for me to check the chattiness level of Windows, maybe we can help each other out 
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Regedits don't fully disable windows 10 telemetry. There's a lot more that's baked in.
ORLY? Is that an "any-version" thing? The reason I ask is because in GPEdit, it seems to list my version as inclusive to the policy(despite 1-3 originally being available in the usage data drop-down).
I'm a bit lost. What I genuinely want to know is if Enterprise, EDU, IoT, and Server versions of Windows are still being mined, despite GroupPolicy's wording.
If this is the case, it opens up a debate on whether or not what they are doing is legal.
I wish it was not legal. But determining the chattiness level of Windows sure seems like a good research, sadly I can not help you with that 
It is the best, but not the easiest
Wonder if anyone has any ideas about the following hypothetical scenario:
If for instance you wanted to run a W10 box that had all "Microsoft Traffic" blocked at the firewall level.. Does Windows assume that you will have a constant connection with Microsofts servers to collect the telemetry or would it "store" telemetry data until such a time when it can all be sent to the servers. This brings up a couple of questions:
1. If it does store the telemetry data, where is it stored?
2. Could it be purged before a connection was established if say you wanted to allow for a check for updates to go out and come back?