That's the part that makes everybody nervous though. Everything from the global dragnet surveillance network to the marketing company behind your grocery store app is most interested in "metadata."

Companies like Microsoft will loudly say they don't want your cat pictures and memes and college papers, they're not tying your usage to an explicit file with your name and favorite pasta varieties...

...BUT that forced transmission of "anonymous user data", could potentially be super effective in identifying and manipulating you. With enough of it, you can easily put together a profile of an individual.

Heck, for a while, TOR would advise against resizing your brower window because the window size in pixels could potentially help fingerprint you on the web. How nuts is that?!

Most people actually worried about a spook digging through "\videos\Homework\" are indeed paranoid.

But there's been a lot of research at what can be done even if you're just "userID 1284hdkfuw724bfiueb"

Sure but it still requires trusting them when they pinky promise they won't send any recall data. Fuck them tbh. It just makes me feel even more right about my decision to switch to Linux years ago.