It gets much worse than that. They just changed the EULA to 'allow' them to delete or render inactive software, hardware or peripherals that they deem illegitimate or pirated ... and it's not just their software / hardware / peripherals, but any. Aside from the very obvious privacy issues, intent, imperfect application and that they have zero jurisdiction to act as judge, jury and executioner in complex legal matters, this cannot possibly be compatible with EU law. I really hope they get smacked with another huge fine ... hopefully it won't take a 5-10 year investigation to slap this one down. Aside from snooping, this is very clearly what the mandatory updates are aimed at. I'd encourage anyone to write to the relevant EU authorities about this, and particularly the Competition Commission, since this could clearly be used to disadvantage competitors.

Oh, and something I wasn't aware of until recently was that since W8, MS allows OEMs to rootkit their own hardware through a backdoor in Windows which allows firmware to inject code into even freshly formatted and (some) encrypted hard drives. That crapware or malware shipped with the system? If you remove it or wipe and reinstall, it'll be there when you reboot. Good stuff. Lenovo & HP have reportedly begun using this, with Lenovo support claiming that they 'own' the hardware you bought, and it's against the ToS to even format and install a fresh copy of Windows.

Thin end of the wedge.

Looks like W7 will indeed be my last Windows OS, unless a comprehensive and transparent rooting method becomes available for W10 (from what I understand, so much is now reliant on mothership based auth that it will be massively harder than previous versions), allowing you to disable all the ********.