“spying on you” sounds scary… Until you actually think about the person at the other end. A development team tracking a race condition. A mix of people from around the world doing text tagging on screenshots or transcribing voice recordings.

“Your operating system is spying on you” becomes just a dog whistle for “I’m the main character” types because it immediately fails when you start thinking about how it would have to work.

“But they have all this person information on me and they keep trying to sign me up to OneDrive! Any government could just bribe them and get access to it all!” Yes, and then need to recruit and employ thousands of government workers to sift through it looking for dissidence.

Far cheaper and much easier to go through already state owned information or bribe ISPs or just do what’s always worked and… Make stuff up.

The only real value to this information is trying to work out why the latest cumulative update has introduced a printing bug. Nearly all apps ask for you to turn this on and it’s not so they can get your browsing habits, it’s so they don’t have to respond to thousands of angry forum messages that something is not working and then guide every single one of them through the same 10 steps to collect log files and ask about what they were doing and their environment.