This article's title is actually refuted by the article itself:<p>> Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it appears that little or no traffic gets sent.<p>So unless you opt in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program, none of this is meaningful. Windows 7 or 8 is not "spying" on you any more than Windows 10 is.<p>Windows 10 has been accused of a lot, but every time you dig into the accusations you come up with nothing. Nobody has been able to pin one actual issue on Windows 10 yet, but not for lack of trying.<p>This all started because Microsoft had extremely aggressive metrics built into the beta of 10, and then made the mistake of actually giving people all of their privacy settings in one singular place (instead of distributing them all over the OS like in 8 and prior).<p>If you ignore Cortana and associated privacy settings, very little has changed in 10.