It's not telemetry. You just have to look at the junk that gets put in that huge banner across the top of the system settings to figure out what this is. It's not reporting you to Microsoft. It's reporting stuff from Microsoft to you.
2021.1019.1.0 is, as I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44209402, a date. It's publishing a date from earlier this year now, in 2025. It's the date that something downloadable from Microsoft changed to a newer version. And in fact there are several things that got updated on April the 24th that are likely candidates here. There were update candidates for what this could be on October the 19th of 2021. The most likely is updates to Windows Update itself.
As for Bing: Well in M. Horowitz's screenshot one can see that it's showing the prompt to have the "full customer experience". On other machines, you'll find that that area contains little icons about the statuses of Microsoft Rewards, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft OneDrive, Windows Update, and others. It's fairly obvious that the System Settings program has to make HTTP(S) queries to on-line services to show all of this stuff, including asking Bing how many Microsoft Rewards the user has earned. I wouldn't be surprised if it simply always did that, even if it never displayed the icon. And those queries involve DNS lookups.
System Settings is querying various WWW services for the little icons at the top of its window, and the very prompt to run through the "full customer experience" dance that we can see right there in the screenshot.
It's not telemetry. You just have to look at the junk that gets put in that huge banner across the top of the system settings to figure out what this is. It's not reporting you to Microsoft. It's reporting stuff from Microsoft to you.
2021.1019.1.0 is, as I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44209402, a date. It's publishing a date from earlier this year now, in 2025. It's the date that something downloadable from Microsoft changed to a newer version. And in fact there are several things that got updated on April the 24th that are likely candidates here. There were update candidates for what this could be on October the 19th of 2021. The most likely is updates to Windows Update itself.
As for Bing: Well in M. Horowitz's screenshot one can see that it's showing the prompt to have the "full customer experience". On other machines, you'll find that that area contains little icons about the statuses of Microsoft Rewards, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft OneDrive, Windows Update, and others. It's fairly obvious that the System Settings program has to make HTTP(S) queries to on-line services to show all of this stuff, including asking Bing how many Microsoft Rewards the user has earned. I wouldn't be surprised if it simply always did that, even if it never displayed the icon. And those queries involve DNS lookups.
System Settings is querying various WWW services for the little icons at the top of its window, and the very prompt to run through the "full customer experience" dance that we can see right there in the screenshot.