Is here to help you stop your Windows PC taking note of your every move.

Nathan Taylor

More than any version of Windows before it, Windows 10 is built to Hoover up massive amounts of information about your activity and send it back to Microsoft. Microsoft, of course, claims that this is benign, used to enhance your experience with the operating system. And to be fair, it’s no more than Google and Apple do. But if you’re not comfortable with your desktop OS gathering information about you, there are measures you can take.

PRIVACY OPTIONS

The obvious place to start is in the Privacy section of Windows 10’s settings. In the ‘General’ tab, you can just switch everything to off. The one option we might recommend leaving on is the SmartScreen Filter for apps, which filters malicious URLs visited by Windows Store apps the way that Internet Explorer does. This means that you can’t visit a malicious website in any app using the new WinRT runtime (which is the new core application architecture introduced in Windows 8 and used in most Windows Store apps).

FEEDBACK & DIAGNOSTICS

While you’re in the Privacy settings, you’ll see a section called ‘Feedback & diagnostics’ where you can control the amount of times Windows 10 asks for your feedback or how much information it gathers and sends back to Microsoft for resolving system issues.

This is something of a problem point in Windows, since there’s no easy way to turn it off completely. You can turn off feedback (and should, if you don’t want to be annoyed by popup questions), but the best you can do is set ‘Diagnostic and usage data’ to ‘Basic’.

Even on Basic, when an app crashes or Microsoft requests diagnostic data, it will still send your full system specs, programs run, the device’s IP address and other network information. And that’s the minimum setting.

The best way to combat this is to disable the system services that send data back to Microsoft. Press Windows-R and type services.msc into the Run box. Look for ‘Connected User Experiences