Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do – here’s how to opt out

**2635599** · August 10th, 2015 08:19 PM

Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do – here’s how to opt out

By Zach Epstein on Jul 31, 2015 at 9:05 AM

Windows 10 is amazing. Windows 10 is fantastic. Windows 10 is glorious. Windows 10 is faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any Windows operating system that has come before it. Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been, addressing nearly all of the major problems users had with Microsoft’s previous-generation platform in one fell swoop.

But there’s something you should know: As you read this article from your newly upgraded PC, Windows 10 is also spying on nearly everything you do.

DON’T MISS: Windows 10: The first 5 things you need to do immediately after you install it

It’s your own fault if you don’t know that Windows 10 is spying on you. That’s what people always say when users fail to read through a company’s terms of service document, right?
Well, here is Microsoft’s 12,000-word service agreement. Some of it is probably in English. We’re pretty sure it says you can’t steal Windows or use Windows to send spam, and also that Microsoft retains the right to take possession of your first-born child if it so chooses. And that’s only one of several documents you’ll have to read through.
Actually, here’s one excerpt from Microsoft’s terms of use that everyone can understand:
"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to."
If that sentence sent shudders down your spine, don’t worry. As invasive as it is, Microsoft does allow Windows 10 users to opt out of all of the features that might be considered invasions of privacy. Of course, users are opted in by default, which is more than a little disconcerting, but let’s focus on the solution.
Rock Paper Shotgun has broken things down into four main bullet points that will guide you through regaining control of your personal data.

First, you’ll want to open Settings and click on Privacy. There, you’ll find 13 different screens — yes, 13 — to go through, and you’ll want to disable anything that seems worrying. The blog notes that most of the important settings can be found on the General tab, though other tabs are important as well. For example, you’ll definitely want to adjust what types of data each app on your system can access.
Next, users should consider dumping Cortana. Yes, the voice-driven assistant is easily one of the best new features in Windows 10, but it also plays fast and loose with your data. As a result, many users will find that the benefits do not outweigh the risks.
For the third task, you’ll have to venture outside the confines of your PC and hit the web. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to check out Microsoft’s nifty new Edge browser. In it, click on this link and set both “Personalised ads in this browser” and “Personalised ads wherever I use my Microsoft account” to off. This will disable Microsoft’s Google-style ad tracking features.
The last tip is one that most users will likely forgo, as it is a bit excessive. Rock Paper Shotgun recommends removing your Microsoft account from Windows 10 completely and using a newly made local account instead. This way, Microsoft doesn’t grab hold of all your data to sync it across machines. To us that’s a great and useful feature, but if you want to kill it just follow the link below in our source section for complete instructions and plenty more details.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Windows 10 Is Spying On You: Here’s How To Stop It

By Alec Meer on July 30th, 2015 at 3:00 pm.

Windows 10‘s privacy settings very much need to be frowned at. Essentially: unless you pay close attention to the fluffy options offered when you first install Microsoft’s new operating system, it’s going to quietly track your behaviour and use it to fire targeted ads at you, as well as keeping tabs on your location history, data from messages, calendars, contacts and God knows what else. It is a bit scary, despite coming off the back of Microsoft’s own pledge to offer ‘real transparency’. You may or may not be OK with this yourself, but in any event at least some of this stuff can be turned off after the fact. I’ll explain how to do that below.
Yesterday we talked about whether or not you should upgrade to Microsoft’s new operating system and before that we looked at the potentially dodgy WiFi Sense feature. Privacy is an even bigger issue.
Conventional wisdom has it that Microsoft’s fight for technological relevance is against Apple. For a time that was true, but as of late they’ve effectively ceded the floor to the Cupertino mob when it comes to hardware (although I hope the Surface Pro line continues – I’m a big fan) and have once again narrowed their computing focus to software. The battle there is against Google, whose search, browser and productivity tools increasingly form a loose, web-based operating system. People aren’t so hot on paying for things these days, which means the money comes from harvesting data and flogging it to advertisers and other organizations who want to know exactly what we’re all up to online. Microsoft want a piece of that, so if you ever wondered why they’ve made the Windows 10 upgrade free to Win 7 & 8 users, here’s one possible answer. Windows 10 has all sorts of user tracking baked right in.
Importantly, you can opt out of what seems to be all this stuff (time will tell) either during installation or afterwards, though Microsoft swaddle it in a combination of dissembling “hey, this stuff’ll really help you get the information you want’ fluff and 45 pages of service agreement documents. I’ll refer you here and here for a detailed breakdown of the really worrying stuff, but the long and short of it is the operating system assigns you a unique advertising ID, which is is tied to the email address you’ve associated with Windows and fed data from a great many facets of your computer usage. Including the contents of messages and calendars, apps and networks, some purchases and whatever you upload to Microsoft’s unreliable OneDrive cloud storage. Using the Cortana search assistant makes the harvest even more aggressive, and of course the OS claims it’s all in the name of a better, more accurate online experience for you.
Look: so much of the business of the internet is currently built around advertising. People are well-accustomed to getting their information for free, and in the absence of a more mutually satisfying system that’s where we are for now (hello, uh, please either whitelist RPS in your adblocker and/or take a look at our Supporter scheme if you feel like this website should stick around for a while). The likes of Google (especially the increasingly ubiquitous Chrome browser, increasingly a hub for their services and data tracking) Facebook and Twitter are already snaffling up untold amounts of information about us, while your smartphone is essentially a pocket-sized vault of sale-able information about you, and for better or worse the majority of users appear to be taking that in their stride. But it becomes something else when the very infrastructure of your computer is keeping tabs on most everything you do and then selling it on to unknown third-parties, as well as potentially storing it on someone else’s servers forever.
Our lives are on our computers, and our lives are nobody else’s business. I don’t want to wind up seeing adverts for tents while playing Solitaire because I spend a bit too much time looking at my photos of a camping holiday from 2004 and mourning the youth and freedom I had then. I definitely don’t want Windows knowing about my kid and then giving me consumerist recommendations on how to raise her. And I most definitely am not cool with this:
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”
In terms of raw practicality, you’re unlikely to actually notice any of this happening, especially as to some degree the results of it will appear as ads within Windows Store apps – and that thing ain’t exactly a smash hit yet. Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s new Edge browser will also be bigger beneficiaries.

The new version of Solitaire also features ads (see above) unless you pay to unlock them, which is a particularly heartbreaking sign of the times, and that’s one example of somewhere this is likely to weave its dark spell. Essentially, you might wind up clicking on more ads than you otherwise would, because they’re tailored to your interests. Some people may not mind that, others will find it to be profoundly sinister.
Conceptually it’s another story entirely: a large corporation is gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits, and not simply what you do in a browser.
The other issue here is that Microsoft simply aren’t making it clear enough that they’re doing this, how it might affect you and how to opt out – despite chest-thumping, we’re-all-chums-here talk about how “real transparency starts with straightforward terms and policies that people can clearly understand.”

There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes “real transparency.”

How to opt out;

OK, here’s how to take control of this stuff if you’re worried about it. No, opting out is not especially simple, although if you take an absolutist approach it doesn’t take at all long to set everything to ‘no.’ If you’re yet to install Windows 10 and are concerned about all this stuff, you can head most of it off at the pass by declining Express settings and choosing options yourself, refusing any request to let the OS or apps access your location and turning the Cortana search assistant off. If you missed the boat there, you’ll need to do any and all of the following. Even if you were super-cautious during setup, be sure to follow step 3 below if you’re concerned.
1. Go to Settings – Privacy and go through the 13 different screens there and turn anything which concerns you to off. The biggest, most universal settings are under ‘General’, while the other screens let you choose which apps can and can’t access your calendar, messages, camera, mic, etcetera. There may well be stuff you want to leave on – for instance, I do actually want Windows’ Calendar app to access my calendar data (obv), I just don’t want it to sell that data on because I don’t want to be bombarded with flower ads when it’s my mum’s birthday.
2. Depending on whether you’ve been finding it useful or not, you may want to go to Cortana’s settings and turn off everything there. It’s just working as a basic file search for me now, as I didn’t want its ‘suggestions’, I didn’t want it to lock me into Bing and I didn’t want a tiny part of my processor to be forever dedicated to listening out for voice commands I will never use.
3. This is the crucial one, and so fundamental to Windows 10’s tracking that Microsoft have stuck the setting on an external website, which they say is so that it’s on one easy dashboard, but I find it hard not to wonder if it’s in the hope that we don’t easily stumble across it while browsing Windows 10’s own Privacy menus. Said website is colorful and cheerful and can play a video at you talking about how wonderful targeted advertising is. Ignore the bumf and instead go directly here and set both options to Off. It’s the innocuous-sounding “Personalised ads wherever I use my Microsoft account” which is the likely root of all this, because having that on means Windows 10 itself becomes a hub for targeted ads. You’ll probably have set up Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, because it heavily encourages you to do so with talk of synchronised files and settings and a OneDrive cloud account during installation, but this means the OS is signed into that account all the time. As a result, Windows 10 itself has it spyglasses on, not just apps or pages that you’re signed into with your MS account.

I notice that every time I go back to that page, the “Personalized ads in this browser” setting has silently turned itself back on again. This is concerning, but I’m not yet sure if it’s a bug or if it’s exploiting sessions as an excuse to reset regularly. Judicious ad and cookie control with your plugins and browser options of choice can change this, however. Again, do remember that many websites are dependent on advertising revenue to survive, but opting out of targeted advertising – and having that opt out be respected – is another matter entirely.

4. You may also wish to remove your Microsoft account from Windows 10 and use a local account instead. This will double-down on restricting what’s harvested, though you’ll lose out on features such as settings synchronisation across all your PCs and will suffer more nagging from stuff like the Windows Store and OneDrive. Probably not a big deal for many people, I suspect. Go to Settings – Accounts – Your Account within Windows 10 (or just type ‘Accounts’ into haha Cortana) to get to the relevant options.
If you have multiple PCs already running Windows 10 you’ll need to do all of this on each of them, although your Microsoft account opt-out should be universal.
None of these options mean you’ll see fewer ads, but they do mean that not quite so much information about you will be gathered and sold, and also that the ads you do see won’t be ‘relevant’ to what algorithms have decided your interests are. It is worth noting that some folk find the latter to be preferable to entirely irrelevant ads, and in some cases even useful – but certainly not everyone. Hopefully you can use the information here to make an informed choice about what happens. Again, in many respects it’s not wildly different from what already happens on your smart phone or your browser, but it’s important that you should know about it, and that Windows now has something of an ulterior motive.
More options, or clearer options, may become available in time, depending on how much of the world frowns at Microsoft about this. I’ll let you know if I hear of anything else that needs doing in order to have Windows 10 respect your privacy.

Oh ya Windows 10 is all shiny and new and you just love playing with it..

And surely you've wondered why MS is giving 10 away for FREE ???
Why? Because YOU HAVE JUST BECOME THE PRODUCT !!!

So my question to everyone is this... WHY USE 10...Why submit all your privacy and data to their servers per their 45 page EULA ?

Honestly, what does Windows 10 bring to the table in new features that don't require you to turn over your soul (and maybe your first born) to Microsoft in order to use???

As for me and my family, our privacy, our security, our data, and our network...I'll pass and stay with 7...

Whatever your choice is, it's now an informed one.
You're now aware of the details and risks, and you have step by step how to disable them, thanks to
Rock Paper Shotgun
It will be interesting to see how all the loss of privacy and data mining plays out with society and government over time.
My prediction is that it will not end well for the people....it never does.

**2635599** · August 10th, 2015 08:23 PM

Destroy Windows 10 Spying 1.4.1

Destroy Windows 10 Spying is a portable app that can block anonymous data being sent, remove apps that can’t be removed the standard way and more. I liked that it can remove some of the Windows default programs that can be removed under Apps & Features, an annoyance I immediately discovered since I prefer to “slim” down windows.
Some of the domains we know send anonymous information back to Microsoft include:

Code:

vortex.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.ppe.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net:443
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
survey.watson.microsoft.com
watson.live.com
watson.microsoft.com
statsfe2.ws.microsoft.com
corpext.msitadfs.glbdns2.microsoft.com
compatexchange.cloudapp.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
a-0001.a-msedge.net
statsfe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
sls.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
fe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
diagnostics.support.microsoft.com
corp.sts.microsoft.com
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
feedback.windows.com
feedback.microsoft-hohm.com
feedback.search.microsoft.com
rad.msn.com
preview.msn.com
ad.doubleclick.net
ads.msn.com
ads1.msads.net
ads1.msn.com
a.ads1.msn.com
a.ads2.msn.com
adnexus.net
adnxs.com
az361816.vo.msecnd.net
az512334.vo.msecnd.net

Changed the principle of removing keylogger (removes 100% is now)
Use Edge and Windows Store without problems. They do not send data to the server M $ (they are added to the hosts)
Now Windows Update does not send any data about your computer and sends only necessary to download updates.

You can block these yourself manually in your hosts file with 127.0.0.1 if you want. The program allows you to clear or view the hosts file in Notepad. The program does the same thing but just in case you wanted to see where your information heads to or you wanted to update your hosts file manually. A log file will be left in the folder you run it from.

File Size | 9.85 MB

DOWNLOAD:

https://userscloud.com/kqtk7gqrdxiw

**freak69ize** · August 11th, 2015 01:26 AM

Have you tried it??

**Harvey Sewdin** · August 11th, 2015 11:45 AM

When I install Windows 10, I'll give it a good treatment first. Hate these shady moves by MS.

**2635599** · August 11th, 2015 02:23 PM

Originally Posted by freak69ize

Have you tried it??

yes i scanned it with malwarebytes and bitdefender internet security 2015 it's clean, and it seems to work as advertised.

**Dark Knight** · August 11th, 2015 02:39 PM

I love they way the term "spying" gets used. Some people know how to stir the pot and mess up a wet dream.

People, no one is "spying" on you personally, the only thing that gets sent to anyone is usage and performance data.
If you haven't realized it until now, usage and performance data has been collected since the dawn of the internet, that's right, good old MS has been collecting this data since it's very first operating system.
So if you think that there are some people sitting in a dark office in Redmond pouring over every move you personally make on your computer or internet, your wrong.

No one is scruitinizng every website you visit, every dirty picture that may have popped up on your screen, every accidental Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Sadam Hussein, or Binladen picture that was shown on your screen from some scraper site that you may have visited. No one is watching your every move on the internet unless you give them a reason to watch you and if that is the case then you must be up to some pretty sick *****.

Microsoft has been collecting this data since the very beginning of operating systems, whether you realized it or not, it just hasn't been publicized or brought to the fore front until recently. So if they were "collecting any personal data" on you, chances are they had what they needed a long time ago. If your that worried about what they are collecting then chances are your up to no good or you just need to "unplug".
I mean really, what do you expect for free? MS basically gave away an operating system to billions of users for free, did you really expect them not to want to colect any useage and perfomance data on it? how in the world do you think technology advances? part of the advances in technology is because of this information.
But it was free, so unless you walked into a retailer and slapped your $200 down on the counter to purchase your copy of Windows then don't compalain, you paid nothing for it.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe in a certain amount of privacy but the very moment you plug into the internet you lose some of that privacy, this is why things like bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, full names, addresses, birthdates and phone numbers are not stored locally on my system, that sort of stuff gets stored on removable drives and is only connected when needed and that's just to twart those that want that information for nefarious reasons. But if you think just by turning a few things off it's going to ensure your privacy, your wrong, as long as you are plugged in you can be identified and found if absolutely necessary.

The minute you click "I Agree" on the eula that pops up when installing Windows, or any piece of software for that matter you are agreeing to give up a certain amount of privacy, it is all right there in the eula, it's not only Microsoft that everyone wants to demonize that does it, hell, even your security software collects data an performance usage, anything that connects to the internet does. So as far as Microsoft being "shady"? it's just not so, why? because you agreed to it when you installed it.

What I am getting at is that the word "privacy" is just that ..... a word, the moment you were born and that birth certificate was drawn up you gave up your right to a certain amount of privacy and as years go by you lose just a little bit more of that privacy, everytime you swipe that debit or credit card, data is collected, everytime you deposit or withdraw money from your bank, data is collected, everytime you renew your drivers license or register a vehical, data is collected, everytime you turn on your television and tune to a certain channel ..... data is collected, and so on, it has become a fact of life. So, it's not only Microsoft that does it, your information is out there in everyday life, there is no escaping it and it's never going to change. You can turn one thing off to try to stop information from getting out but another that you don't know about will open up, all you can do is minimize it, other than that, the best advice I can give to anyone who is THAT concerned about "their privacy" is ..... Unplug and move to the mountains and live off the grid because that is the ONLY way to ensure your "privacy" otherwise minimize it and deal with it because there is no way of getting around it.