I'm guessing "lol you think the data mining is actually disabled now, Mr. Smith of St. Louis SSN 291-52-xxxx, who prefers to have taco night on wednesdays, and does most of his online shopping sunday mornings."
Joke's on them.
Microsoft probably just bought that info from my Android location history.
I doubt it affects them that much, as there's always going to be powerusers. They get a lot of their telemetry from unsuspecting users / laymen buying those cheap Windows10 tablets you see everywhere now.
Actually, a good part of the data collection is for having crashdumps to actually fix bugs. Not that many people write feedback.
I'm an enigneer on Windows. We actually use the crash dumps and the more the better so we can prioritize reliability bugs. Usage telemetry helps us prioritize work, like which settings to migrate from Control Panel to Settings first, or to see if design changes actually made things better for people.
How do engineers there feel about the fact that the data is encrypted so users don't even know what MS knows about them, and how those interested in privacy have to resort to something like this?
Unfortunately, the admirable removal of reliability bugs is in the same breath as migrating settings away from Control Panel, when the latter is another one of the things reducing the quality of the Microsoft/Windows experience.