Then of course, there's Google and Facebook - companies who work on the premise of learning everything about us and using (and sharing and selling) that information for their profits!
That's not really how either of those companies operate, or Microsoft for that matter. You'd probably be surprised at the amount of information that
is not collected. All three companies have good privacy controls, and there is a huge drive to focus on privacy across all three companies.
General point - neither Google, Facebook or Microsoft share or sell personal data to advertisers.
And people gripe about Microsoft?
Frankly, when it comes to privacy concerns, Microsoft is the least of our worries.
Microsoft have pretty identical policies and practices to Google, although the datasets vary slightly. Both will make "account profiles" which will contain some personal information, unless you choose to opt out. They'll collect from slightly different data sources - e.g. Microsoft makes use of data from Windows / Xbox / Edge etc, whilst Google makes heavier use of cookies (which are easy to delete).
If connect your PC to your home network via Ethernet, the closest Microsoft knows of your physical location is your POP (point of presence) the physical location where your ISP connects you to the Internet backbone.
This isn't true - there are a range of methods of tracking physical location, and both Microsoft and Google have a very similar location service with similar accuracy. Accuracy can range massively for a variety of reasons, but for example Bing Maps can work out the location of my desktop to within a few meters.
The big caveat - you have to give both Google and Microsoft permission to access your location information, and you can revoke access at any time.
That said, all users must understand that their ISP keeps a record of every action by the user.
But it is not just that our ISPs know every single website we visit and what we did while there. They also know and can tie that information to our real and full names, home addresses, birth dates, and our billing information too.
This used to be more of the case, but the drive to move websites to HTTPS (a move heavily driven by Google and followed by Microsoft) actually makes tracking web history a lot harder. ISPs do have access to your clickstream data, and they do sell this data, however if you're visiting HTTPS websites the clickstream data is basically meaningless - ISPs aren't able to see the websites you visit.
That said, if you install something like Avast or AVG, who
do sell your personal data to advertisers, then you lose that protection as they have access to the HTTPS clickstream data. Although I believe they got enough flak for this that they've stopped doing it, but you should read the terms and conditions of your current AV provider.
