Must be listening in, been working on our new house, talking about electric. 3 way and 4 way circuits, yelling about my lost stud finder & wire strippers.

At least that's how I explain the recent porn ads to my wife......

Windows 10 default settings, plus Cortana and other co-joined non-removable non-opt-out programs, make it so.

There doesn't seem to be any consumer push to legislate normal restrictions...
It's all or nothing at this point.

When you use their products you agree to let them steal all your information:
Including medical/attorney conversations, business data, and personal consumer lifestyle and relationship profiles.

Not to justify, I dislike it all, but MS is just joining the other big boys in the big money-making frenzy.

That's some funny stuff right there!

I understand that you are looking for azz fking dildos?

Win10 HP laptop.
I was getting poor battery life and severe CPU stuttering at times.
Other times were great.

I tried uninstalling the Conexant audio driver because "mic tray.exe" was running and would keep restarting itself even after killing the process.
That driver was previously caught 'accidentally' logging keystrokes..which is not audio.
(plus the sound quality was poor)

But after uninstalling Conexant it would re-install itself at startup.
I couldn't get rid of it.
As a temporary I turned off the microphone in the software settings. Good enough for now.

So I'm laying here watching the Criminal Minds series on the tv and do a Bing search.
I type "c_r_" and the first search suggestion is"Criminal Minds".
There were three suggestions for it.

Corporate stalking..
Just wondering what the legal penalties would be if I drilled a hole in a neighbor's wall and put in a camera/mic.

Of course they are. But they are nowhere near as evil as the G-word, they couldn't be.
And they are not working with Schwartz György to destroy our way of life.