Yeah, I just used Google as an example of one of the several services which are doing pretty much the same thing as MS. If you can avoid using any of these services by running your own server(s), more power to you.

I suppose I'm just mildly annoyed at everyone shitting their pants for Windows 10's security policy, because it's probably giving some people a false sense of security that they won't be subjected to near-identical stuff in pretty much all of the other likely alternatives.

Personally I consider all this cloud/big data stuff deeply fascinating. They are unquestionably useful tools and they can't be as useful as they are without compromising a lot of privacy. It'll be very interesting to see how all of this stuff pans out in the coming decades, especially after some government/corp somewhere makes a high-profile blunder of abusing their access to all of this data.

Note how it says nothing about Windows 10 in there? I think this is for everything MS.

On a further note, Google's privacy policy says very similar things about how/when they might go disclosing their users' information.

As much as I'd like to join the "Microsoft snooping muh privates" bandwagon, aside from all that stuff they're doing with Cortana (which you can decide not to use), they don't really seem to be doing anything terribly new here as far as privacy policies are concerned. Unless you're storing your personal data (including emails and such) on a truly private server, chances are you're already subject to something similar than what MS is doing.