The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.

And this is treated as a bad thing?!

The number of ads you see won’t change, but they may be less relevant to you.

Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.

In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.

The rest of the installation process wasn’t fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like “Let’s get everything set up for you”, and “Let Cortana help you get things done!”.

Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.

  • rekabis
    18·
    10 months ago

    You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.

    Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.

    For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.