Windows is a good and stable OS with a reasonable privacy, BUT ONLY if the first thing you do in a new PC with Windows, to spend an afternoon disabling and throwing out a ton of junk, trials, unnecessary services and functions and most of the telemetry. So if you have a fast and compliant OS. Luckily Windows allows all this, but naturally it requires an advanced user (registry and servicelists can be a comanche territory if you don’t exacly know what you do) and M$ does not offer much documentation and help on this topic either, of course.
But in the new online subscription version they will naturally nip these possibilities in the bud.
Yo can desactivate completly all telemetries, if you want. But it isn’t very usefull. Privacy is often misunderstood, a privacy problem can be when personal data is leaked, your activities on- and offline, but not so much technical details of your PC in case an error report is sent for a driver or other issue, if they send a report about the version of Windows, searches for security updates and patches, things like that that do not compromise privacy at all, because it is data that is identical to millions of other users who use a similar system. Alll other you can block, desactivate or desinstall, apart simply avoiding to use EDGE or Bing por searches, using instead you prefered browser and search engine, which you surely do. I use the Portmaster app, with which I controll all the outgoing and incomming traffic, even blocking it if needed, because of this I know that there isn’t any strange thing that compromises privacy.
You can implement Telementry in a privacy preserving way if you put in some effort but a lot of technical details are anything but unique and absolutely a risk to your privacy, not to talk about what big tech sometimes calls Telemetry. You can disable the majority of tracking in Windows but that takes literal hours and a lot of knowledge and the highest settings (if you aren’t on the enterprise version) still tell you that some data is send to Microsoft servers without specifiying what that is. Portmaster is a cool app but all you can see there are servers your computer connects to and every Windows computer unless it’s cribbled down to the point where updates are disabled connects to Microsoft servers which is okay but also ensures that you can’t know from that data…
Yes, there are some tools which can help, eg https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer, also Windows itself has the GodMode, but it need somewhat more than this and only remove Skype, MS Store and Cortana.
I don’t know, I’ve the Home edition and this came by default with a lot of crap and services to “improve the User experience” as they call it euphemistically and that can only be understood sarcastically.
Windows is a good and stable OS with a reasonable privacy, BUT ONLY if the first thing you do in a new PC with Windows, to spend an afternoon disabling and throwing out a ton of junk, trials, unnecessary services and functions and most of the telemetry. So if you have a fast and compliant OS. Luckily Windows allows all this, but naturally it requires an advanced user (registry and servicelists can be a comanche territory if you don’t exacly know what you do) and M$ does not offer much documentation and help on this topic either, of course. But in the new online subscription version they will naturally nip these possibilities in the bud.
You can’t disable the tracking properly at all so no clue where you get that reasonable privacy first…
Yo can desactivate completly all telemetries, if you want. But it isn’t very usefull. Privacy is often misunderstood, a privacy problem can be when personal data is leaked, your activities on- and offline, but not so much technical details of your PC in case an error report is sent for a driver or other issue, if they send a report about the version of Windows, searches for security updates and patches, things like that that do not compromise privacy at all, because it is data that is identical to millions of other users who use a similar system. Alll other you can block, desactivate or desinstall, apart simply avoiding to use EDGE or Bing por searches, using instead you prefered browser and search engine, which you surely do. I use the Portmaster app, with which I controll all the outgoing and incomming traffic, even blocking it if needed, because of this I know that there isn’t any strange thing that compromises privacy.
You can implement Telementry in a privacy preserving way if you put in some effort but a lot of technical details are anything but unique and absolutely a risk to your privacy, not to talk about what big tech sometimes calls Telemetry. You can disable the majority of tracking in Windows but that takes literal hours and a lot of knowledge and the highest settings (if you aren’t on the enterprise version) still tell you that some data is send to Microsoft servers without specifiying what that is. Portmaster is a cool app but all you can see there are servers your computer connects to and every Windows computer unless it’s cribbled down to the point where updates are disabled connects to Microsoft servers which is okay but also ensures that you can’t know from that data…
Maybe I’m just really fast but it takes me about 10 minutes. About the same amount of time I spend installing and customing a fresh Linux install.
What trials?
Only thing I had to remove was Skype and there are tools that let you do whatever you want in a matter of minutes.
Yes, there are some tools which can help, eg https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer, also Windows itself has the GodMode, but it need somewhat more than this and only remove Skype, MS Store and Cortana.
I don’t use Windows, but doesn’t the LTSC and/or Enterprise edition come with better defaults?
I don’t know, I’ve the Home edition and this came by default with a lot of crap and services to “improve the User experience” as they call it euphemistically and that can only be understood sarcastically.
Yeah, LTSC is basically how Windows should be, with less bloatware and security updates only.
Yeah, cause shockingly enterprise customers don’t like the idea of microsoft taking big chunks of data for no rhyme or reason.