Still not legally PII. Correlated assumptions don't qualify. Bad PR but not PII. PII means very specific things,"a person called jack ryan owns this PC" is not PII, "the owner of this PC was born on 01/02/03" is PII.
From a PR perspective it sort of looks bad but please look at the comparison table on the paper where similar data is collected in the registry,logs,prefetch,etc... Unlike *nix,windows does a ton of activity logging and it has been this way for a long time. Most people know of application,system and security logs for example but in the same log directory there are usually 100-200 other log files including IE browsing related logs.
Sure. But most other places (unsure about Apple) don't automatically ship those logs off to the maker of the OS for centralised bulk collection, analysis, and monetisation.
From a PR perspective it sort of looks bad but please look at the comparison table on the paper where similar data is collected in the registry,logs,prefetch,etc... Unlike *nix,windows does a ton of activity logging and it has been this way for a long time. Most people know of application,system and security logs for example but in the same log directory there are usually 100-200 other log files including IE browsing related logs.