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

[idle]

Blocking with the hosts is not entirely working. Not to mention all the data Microsoft are mining is encrypted which is leaving many in the professional IT field wondering what exactly is being sent, regardless of Microsoft's claims what the data is for.

I have been studying Windows 10 and this issue with keen interest, and besides the outright tin foil hat wearing brigade, there are some very serious privacy issues involved.

As of right now my system is Microsoft free - no Windows here, I nuked Windows 8.1 and have installed Linux instead. Absolutely loving Linux, and will not be installing Windows 10 until at least midway through next year to see what becomes of their data mining, and the efforts to protect one's privacy.

I'm in no rush to have the latest and greatest, and by mid-next year, who knows, I may stick with Linux permanently. It really is up to those technically minded folk who have the ability to give users to tools to disable Microsoft's efforts at mining our data.

Personally I think the goose is cooked. Hence my switch to Linux. Windows 10 is a hybrid cloud based operating system, of which Microsoft have no intention of changing. In fact, if much of what I've been reading has any truth to it, its only the beginning ...

Oh and this isn't something that is Microsoft exclusive. Apple, Google/Android, you name it, are all involved with mining users data, and when everyone of the big boys are in on it, I just know in my bones it ain't good news for the end user.

[Shemhamforash]

Interesting news here: Telemetry and Data Collection are coming to Windows 7 and Windows 8 too. I'm with idle on this, and I use the same distribution as the author of the article from Winaero that Sergey does. But I do dual boot Win 7 too. VirtualBox pretty much negates my "need" for installing Windows on hardware. For what programs I use, Wine works fine as a hack for running Win32 apps.