Of course you did. Large companies have no vested interest in building systems that do the "right thing" for you as defined by tech types like us who are arguably more sensitive on this subject than most people. They are building services that take your information and try to do something interesting enough with it to make it worthwhile...and why is it on by default? Because they want to make money off of the new fea…
It's not wrong or evil or even criminally negligent to want programs that you write to work as intended. With new systems that have fancy machine learning based features developers face the difficulty that making an accurate training data set is impossible, especially at the scale at which Microsoft ships its software. Cortana's abilities to be smart assistant all involve polling the data mentioned in the post, sure you can disable all of them and be blissfully disconnected from network assisted features like her and better handwriting recognition. It's a choice and by default there isnt any harm in leaving most of those options enabled, the average user will only benefit from the interaction. It's okay to be conscious about where you're sending your data but its just ridiculous to frame each new feature released by company as morally wrong or "having no vested interest in doing the right thing".
God forbid we become slaves to the evil corporations. /s