iirc they developed it as a part of Windows 10’s search and indexing subsystem. So you had to, without 3rd party means or doing a little hack&slash work on the registry, disable that subsystem completely to stop it from harvesting data. Since they found a better golden goose in the current AI models to achieve that function, they conveniently got around to putting in the work to strip Cortana out of the system to make way for that

just to add to this, I was wondering why I noticed lemmy.world was now causing my ublock origin and privacy badger to flag me with a cloudflare tracker when there wasn’t one before, and I found this post. every other instance I frequent doesn’t show a single tracker

edit: didn’t want to leave the instances as ambiguous - the instances I go to that don’t show as having any trackers as of the time of this comment: lemmy.ml, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemm.ee, and lemmy.one