The pro and enterprise versions allow you to disable pretty much all of this. The Home version is less able. A lot of the additional data is leaked by using cortana for searches.
That said, I'm not too paranoid about it, but I do understand why others may well be. Also, MS has been doing everything it can, including relatively great pricing to move SMBs to their hosted solutions for AD and Office365 packages. Which I can see as appealing for MS and SMBs. The more recent workspace/scheduling applications added to o365 show this direction, and integrating with LinkedIn cements this a little bit.
Who knows how it will work out in the end... I've been specifically pushing Docker Cloud simply because it can target multiple cloud systems for deploy, instead of the walling in from AWS/GC/Azure in terms of a lot of their own Docker tooling support. In the end, you're paying someone. How much you pay and what you get out of it will vary. But you are paying.
Windows has a lot of business users and is a consumer product; now i would guess that the privacy issues don't quite help with the business audience - but i guess that's a major cash cow; Anybody care to explain how they happen to put a major revenue source in jeopardy? I mean as a software company they aren't too much into targeted advertising anyway, so what do they do with all the data that they are gathering?
i don't know much about business, please enlighten me.