Does anyone know the status of using the Windows Firewall to block this stuff? Since Search and other parts of the OS are actually apps it seems, if you set a default deny, then whitelist only certain parts, wouldn't that sort itself out?

And any idea why MS is acting this way? Certainly offering a hidden opt-out registry key would satisfy a lot of customers, and not impact the telemetry data in a meaningful way. For Office, they literally discarded/sampled the telemetry data as it was simply too much to use.