To be honest, publishing most of what they are collecting makes me trust them less, not more. Why not publish all, what are they hiding?
They are not publishing exactly what they are collecting for the "Full" telemetry setting, which is opt-in. I'm guessing they don't want to commit to that because they want to be free to add and remove metrics they're interested in.
It's just evasive on Microsoft's part.
To their minimal credit, I suppose, you can no longer avoid the toggle when installing or upgrading to the Creators Update, which you could do in previous Windows with telemetry. I doubt that many will still bother even reading the labels of the toggles though, let alone consider whether they'd be better served with an option other than the default.
This is not a list of "telemetry data collected by Windows 10".
I am beginning to suspect that they do not have adequate internal safeguards to control the collection of personally identifiable information across the entire company (including office, bing, skype, linkedin, etc, etc).
That would mean they are actually incapable of enumerating all the information a clean Windows 10 install and office 365 will phone home. It would also explain discrepancies between todays's list and third party audits of Windows 10.
The impression I get is that this information took so long to produce because they did have to sit down with all of the various teams involved.
They also don't seem to be attempting any Orwellian use of the word "telemetry", though it is technically explicit. They start the document by establishing the definition, if you care to question it more directly: https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/config...
This whole thread is somewhat disheartening, actually. Devs - especially ones developing against a broad hardware ecosystem - need feedback from the field to surface problems. That need must be balanced against privacy.
A golden hope would be an open standard for collection and anonymized storage of telemetry data. It's likely difficult to say exactly what is needed from one os to the next though, once you get into the technical details of what needs to be monitored for useful debugging of major subsystems... So seems far fetched.
Hell, everybody's getting rich doing it!
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-dat...
They may not have even considered that "telemetry" might hurt their image (or profits). Even on HN we regularly see people complaining that they cannot switch to a different OS. Technical solutions sometimes help but MS probably assumes that most people will submit to the lockin. Image doesn't matter when most people are tied to the platform. When games are enough to tie people to Windows, MS can do whatever they want.