Deal with Privacy Issues
Windows 10 does not have a great reputation for respecting or protecting your privacy. While it’s not quite the colander some would have you believe, the operating system definitely needs tightening up. So what can you do about it? If you’re about to install or upgrade to Windows 10, make sure you don’t choose “Express settings” during setup—you can then review exactly how Windows wants to track your behavior, and decide whether or not to allow it.
It’s never too late to tighten privacy, even if you missed this step. Start by going to “Start > Settings > Privacy,” and work through the available options. You can configure options such as which apps have access to your camera on an app-by-app basis, or choose a universal setting. If you don’t like Cortana, be sure to select “Speech, inking & typing,” and click “Stop getting to know me.”
Once done, return to the main Settings screen. If you have Wi-Fi, select “Network & Internet > WiFi > Manage WiFi settings.” Disable both “Connect to suggested open hotspots” and “Connect to networks shared by my contacts” to disable Microsoft’s ill-conceived WiFi Sense feature, which will be dropped from the Anniversary Edition.
If all of this is too much effort, or you want help choosing appropriate privacy settings, you should download and run the free (and portable) O&O ShutUp10 tool from www.oo-software.com (look under “Downloads”). It provides a convenient list of all the most common privacy settings, which you can work through as a series of individual switches. Click a setting to get more information about it. Handy symbols indicate which ones are recommended for disabling (green tick and—with additional review—yellow triangle), and clicking the “Actions” button provides some neat shortcuts to applying all the recommended settings in one go.