Windows 10 receives a lot of good reviews from many users. It is light and responsive. It fixes a lot of problems from Windows 8 (and 8.1). However, Windows 10 also comes with few concerns related to some of its default settings. Here is a list of important privacy-related settings you need to know:
General Privacy Options
Right after installing Windows 10, go to Settings > Privacy and check which applications get the right to access your location, camera, microphone, account info, contacts, calendar, messaging and radios. Also, check out to see which apps should be let to run in the background. More apps running in background would generally would drain battery faster, add additional work for the processor and add Internet traffic if those apps are using Internet connection. So, make sure to allow only few selected apps that are actually useful and you absolutely need them to run in background.
Diagnostics and Usage Data
If you do not like the idea of Microsoft collecting any random information from your machine, go to Settings > Privacy > Feedback & diagnostics > Diagnostic and usage data, then change it to Basic. This will prevent Microsoft from collecting the “full” information of things they believe are necessary without we even realise what are the data being sent.
Cortana
Microsoft’s virtual assistant is one of the main features of Windows 10. Indeed it has cool capabilities, but they come at a “price”. Activating Cortana would allow Microsoft to gather a lot of data from our machine, at the context of feeding Cortana with information so she can provide us with “personalised” responses. To make things more alarming, all interactions with Cortana are stored in the cloud. If you think you need to evaluate this further, go to here to clear “things” that Cortana has learned using some data from our machines.
Windows Update
Windows Update is delivered automatically in Windows 10 without any easy way to disable it. The options for how updates are installed are just totally automatic or “notify to schedule restart”. Notice that there is no option to disable Windows Update here, nor even to notify the user before downloading updates. You can prevent Windows from downloading updates when using metered Internet connection, but it will automatically resume the download when it has unmetered connection. To make it more tricky, new connections are considered as “unmetered” until we change it. Many clueless users in metered connection (but have no proper knowledge to do the right settings) could be wondering why their data quota suddenly disappeared.
Updating Multiple Machines
By default, Windows 10 will download data for Windows Update from Microsoft Server and/or other Windows 10 computers who already download the update. Yes, this means once your machine have installed an update (automatically), it will upload pieces of data to other computers who are currently downloading the same update. Again, it will use Internet data in unmetered connection. To turn this off, go to Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options > Choose how updates are delivered. You can switch off this feature completely, or still allow it partially to allow one download for multiple PCs in your local network without allowing upload to other PCs on the Internet.
Finally if you do have time, I strongly suggest to read the long Privacy Statement that usually (almost) no one cares to read. This time, it really matters, we actually need to know some of the information written in the statement if we want to stay in control on how our device is going to operate.
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