Every time something like this comes up, there are side discussions about all the settings and registry edits that can be used to disable various things. Each individual thing is not super hard to change, but there is an ever growing set of ads and personal-info siphoning ‘features’ being added all the time.

It’s deliberately exploitative crap driven by greed. So I’d discourage anyone from being a Microsoft apologist for this stuff. It is not ok.