Seriously? Microsoft made the announcement a year in advance. Nothing was done behind anyone's back - it was well-established that eventually, they would force the upgrade and remove the ability to do a rollback. There were thousands of nerd forum posts and op-ed articles b*tching about it, most of them citing the exact, "Creepy! Muh Privuhcy! I HATE THE EVIL EMPIRE!" reasons you've listed, and a handful of them going so far as to suggest "SCARY NSA SPYING CONSPIRACY!". All of it was quite silly, truth be told. We all, including the government, know the authors of such articles are beating it to porn, and none of us have any interest in knowing exactly what kind of porn gets them going. Nudes of Ayn Rand, presumably.
It was talked about for over a year. There were hundreds of articles that you could've Googled for, that would've explained how to circumvent and/or disable Mr. Softy's ham-fist, just like your friendly IT professional has done for your work computer. The vast majority of IT companies eventually stop supporting their legacy devices/tools. The only reason this is getting any complaints is 1) The delivery method, which most private companies already have a tool that pushes enterprise-level software updates/patches direct to your machine, so in the era of broadband Internet access, Microsoft building one into future versions of Windows shouldn't shock anyone, and 2) the Win7 diehards who didn't want to risk being "upgraded" to junk like Win 8.x. Win10 has been fine.
