nb: ms employee

I would flip MS/Apple personally, but I understand the argument from the perspective of business incentives. Microsoft's incentives don't really care about collection of telemetry, but they have a strong incentive to keep customer data secure from outside entities (e.g., businesses on MS products losing corporate data to outsiders).

I wasn't ranking the company's practices so much as their incentives, based on their business model.

Microsoft derives most of its revenue from enterprise software, the others from consumers. Enterprises are generally more concerned with privacy of their data than consumers.

Arguably Apple have shown better practices of late. My ranking is more what one would expect 'in theory'.

Microsoft puts ads into Windows 10. With ads comes tracking.

Nope, Apple even goes to great lengths to preserve user privacy in the data they collect (See Apple's use of differential privacy)

Pre-Win10, pre-telemetry Microsoft was pretty much "hands-off", i.e. you bought the software and then they mostly left you alone.

Maybe hands off compared to now, but not compared to any other OS of the same era. If it's not activation licences (it's always amused me that performing a hardware upgrade on a cracked copy of XP was less troublesome than on a legally purchased copy), it's frequent notifications "you're not running our firewall", "you don't seem to be running our preferred antivirus", etc. And worse yet, Windows Updates often sneaks in updates for new software you didn't even request and often don't want: Bing search bars, Microsoft's shitty AV, MSN Messenger (back in the 90s), Silverlight, Windows 10(!!!) etc.

Compare that to Linux, OS X, BeOS, any of the BSDs, etc and the difference is night and day. Ok, Ubuntu had a stint of including Amazon results in their search but they were relatively transparent about that and it was quickly disabled by default after the backlash they, deservingly imo, received.

Windows has always been very "hands on" because it's designed for users who are very "hands off".