I have installed Windows 10 on a couple of computers and have gone through the routines of disabling all the privacy options and using the registry, group policy and file permissions methods of disabling telemetry. Although reading threads like this I see that this is not enough to stop all the spying.
I had decided not to upgrade my Windows 7 and 8 machines to try and avoid this, but now Microsoft is pushing these tracking services through Windows Update, I am wondering whether to just upgrade to Windows 10 and have done with it. At least then I can go about using the known methods and tools for disabling these features in Windows 10.
I know you can just prevent the updates from installing, but I have seen several different sets of updates listed as adding the tracking services on various websites, so there is more work to do than just hiding a few of them. They have also probably already been installed on some of the machines with automatic updates enabled.
Windows 10 has all that nasty stuff built in by default. On Win7 and 8.1 you can at least choose not to install the updates that have been found to be suspect/malicious. The older versions are still your best bet, but you will indeed need to go through the updates and hide/disable the ones you don't want. You also need to check the old ones and look up the knowledgebase articles every time there are new ones.
If anything, for those who care about their privacy Linux is slowly becoming the more user-friendly OS.
Definitely user linux as your daily driver if you want some privacy. Could reserve Windows for Adobe and gaming or whatever, if you want, and then only boot into it when you want to use those. That is what I am planning to do soon enough.
you should beware then, first preps for win10 upgrade on win7 were actual 'security' patches. If you were to look into them for details, you would see no content at all.
well if they realy wanne inject all the malware into windows 7 /8.1 aswell. I think there will be probably not much you could do about it. There is allways trustedinstaller which still can inject the crap if they want to. Just check how often trusted installer promps up in your task manager after a could restart lately. So i would not be surpised that MS would use the windows module installer for it aswell.