If you really want anonymity, just run tails from an usb key with a VPN lol.
I'm not an activist who has my life to hide so I disable most of the telemetry options and confidentiality options and yes it does take a couple of minutes (else if you want to disable every piece of diagnostic you send to M$, that can take quite some times).
I'm not talking into the perspective of someone who has something to hide. I'm talking from an enterprise point of view; I hope you patch your systems dude. Just wait a week before pushing patches just to be sure that if there's one bad patch that brick something, you'll know in a week for sure.
But it's not to me that you need to say that patch ain't the only thing in the world that protect your PC please. Patching your PC is the least you can do to be secure.
Who says VPNs are 100% and even if it is who the hell would rely only on one thing. Why are you even trying to "advise" me like you know anything at all about this, that's the most stupid random internet advice ever, to rely on like one single thing.
Your classic assumption about "doing something bad" being the reason for privacy is the dead giveway you have no idea what is going on and the whole issue altogether, do you close your door when you go to toilet, why does MS have to know that.
If you use Windows 10 then why don't you build your house from transparent glass, every single wall and door would be transparent, you have nothing to hide right. If you don't have a problem with that, that's your decision and you can't force it on others.
And the final nail in the coffin is when you actually believe that those GUI options could be trusted, you are all fools, and I don't mean that insulting, I'm just stating the unfortunate reality. The data being sent might get lessened, but that's about it, this data is being piped through supercomputer AI's, even if they don't get full details at hand they can calculate a good estimate what you were probably talking about in that 10:30 PM phone message or something.
What about the fact that they GAIN FINANCIAL BENEFIT AND I DONT GET NOTHING IN RETURN ?
Corporate espionage will never be the same again with Windows 10, you think it's a coincidence they acquired GitHub, put those Windows double quotes on "private repo". I laugh and cry at the same time whenever I see all those big presentations, conferences and corporate offices with their shiny default windows 10 running on all those screens in the background, while in the back it's all siphoning all those "internal documents" like vacuum machine, it's a total joke, totally unfair, totally criminal, but they'll keep doing it as long as everyone keeps giving them the naked butt for free.
Indeed they may not be directly transferring off hard drive, it would be too risky, would get caught, they probably sniff a ton of metadata (favourites, recent, caches) about filenames, you start uploading that to cloud storage, license terms, bye bye, but they may be doing it directly off the hard drive anyway ... if it's in the license terms which nobody is suppose to read ofcourse.
Why the heck isn't there a LAW which would define the things that corporations/businesses CANNOT PUT INTO ANY KIND OF AGREEMENT - Obviously the first thing that should be on such a list would be the most ridicolous thing of agreeing to waive your right to file a class-action lawsuit, HOW the hell is that even possible I've always been asking my self, how the hell is that legal from the fundamental core of laws, if you transferred that into programming language, it would be a kernel panic. Which means, this thing they keep hammering, "Democracy" is really full of crap, it's all buggy and broken, but hey maybe it's correct by design, probably because the term "democracy" doesn't contain the idea of fairness.
I bet you're one of those people who's as glossy-eyed about Cloud Storage, why don't go all the way, why wait 10 years down the line, why don't just go to Microsoft right now and ask them to make an online toilet snapper, you go to the toilet and it snaps and sends a picture instantly to a Microsoft ToilSnap Representative, via multi hot-link satellite laser digital omg connection, not a milisecond too late, it's for science you know, so it's all right.