The printer thing seems pretty unrelated, and I don’t think there’s much evidence that simply logging in to your system with your Microsoft account has anything to do with telemetry of the actual content of your computer.

You can obviously send a lot of personal data through Microsoft services that use that account, but merely logging in that way doesn’t seem to just upload your life to Microsoft, either.

> The printer thing seems pretty unrelated

It's a simple example of how the arcane telemetry they demand is actually far more dangerous to you than it first appears.

This is incredibly common when it comes to security and privacy issues, where it's not immediately obvious how things can be abused. (The truly obvious things tend to get fixed, after all.)

> I don’t think [...] your Microsoft account has anything to do with telemetry

My brother in tech, I think you're blinding yourself out of forlorn hope here.

Microsoft has spent over a decade increasing the mandatory "telemetry", which contains a complete profile all your computer hardware with serial numbers plus all the software you run and when you run it [0]. The same company has consistently made it harder and harder for anyone to not sign up for an account in order to even install the OS.

They already collect the data in a very deliberate and strategic way. What you ought to be seeking is evidence they don't keep it.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12506