Well Microsoft are no strangers to data mining and having experimented recently with data on/off it seems like you are never truly “offline” at all with msfs2020
Even with all data options disabled (checked and double checked) there is a persistent connection and data transfer that the flightsim.exe is making.
The numbers are very small. But it’s constant and persistent. One assumes a continuous validation “heartbeat” while running the sim?
So, if validation data is constantly being collected presumably it would not be outside the realms of possibility to collect system and performance data?