How to Stop Windows 10 From Spying on you

Rock Paper Shotgun has a post on stopping Windows 10 from Spying on you.

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…

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…

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.”

The procedure to turn it all off is at the link, but know that it probably won’t close Big Brother’s backdoor to everything on your system.