> There a number of guides about what to turn off to protect privacy and enhance security.

Most of those guides degrade security, not enhance it.

Some gems I've read[0][1]: Disable Smartscreen, Disable Windows Defender, Disable or Delay Windows Update, Block Time Synchronisation in the Hosts file, Disable Biometric login, Disable driver updates, Disable Secure Boot/TPM Chip, and Disable UAC.

This is the Dunning–Kruger effect[2] all over. Most people who "know better" would never write such a guide; or the guide would just tell you to flip a half dozen switches in the official Settings -> Privacy UI and Cortana -> Settings UI, rather than disabling key security features. But longer more detailed looking guides are generally more popular in spite of being completely wrong/bad practice.

[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2971725/windows/how-to-reclai...

[1] http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/window-10-privacy-settings-how-to-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

You are, of course, absolutely correct. I suspect that's not going to be a very popular approach ;-)

Microsoft is evil, therefore I should change every setting to whatever the opposite of the default is!

> There a number of guides

Yeah, that's the problem. You might miss some.

And if you don't, they'll just make the permissions more granular and default the new granular options to on. Like Twitter does with their 83 different categories of email notification.

Try Spybot Anti-Beacon.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

I use "ShutUp10" which is a nearly one-click solution to turn off all the crap. I wouldn't use Windows at all except I own a Vive and it only works with Windows. It is amazing to me that people put up with it as a daily OS.

If you care about privacy you wouldn't use Windows, so spending time trying to disable privacy related features is bizarre to me.