Submission + - Microsoft's Anti-privacy in Windows 7, 8 in Detail
WheezyJoe writes: ghacks, Extremetech, Ars, and even Forbes are providing more detail about Windows 10's telemetry and "privacy invasion" features being backported to Windows 7 and 8. The articles list and explain some of the involved hotfixes by number (e.g., KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149). The Extremetech and ghacks articles suggest what you might be able to do about it.
gHacks notes that ”these four updates ignore existing user preferences stored in Windows 7 and Windows 8 (including any edits made to the Hosts file) and immediately starts exchanging user data with vortex-win.data.microsoft.com and settings-win.data.microsoft.com. These, and maybe others, appear to be hardcoded which means that the Hosts file is bypassed automatically”
