I installed it on a friend's laptop last weekend and diligently turned off all of those "report to the mother-ship" switches. It sounds like they're only window dressing. And even though we chose to save her original settings, I had to hide the "Cortana" feature and reset her default browser to Chrome. MS had set it to Edge.

I have mixed feelings about holding onto Win7 - it is solid and supported right now, but they're pulling the rug out from under the older operating systems pretty quickly. Only IE 11 is supported now, also.