The tips, ads, and recommendations you see will be more generic and may be less relevant to you.
And this is treated as a bad thing?!
The number of ads you see won’t change, but they may be less relevant to you.
Send only info about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly.
In other words, even after turning off all the settings, your data still gets collected.
The rest of the installation process wasn’t fun either. It was worded in this weird, condescending tone, like “Let’s get everything set up for you”, and “Let Cortana help you get things done!”.
Thank goodness for FLOSS and GNU/Linux.
Yea, it’s really shitty.
Enterprise folks don’t have this problem because they use the WAIK (or whatever it’s called now) to customize the installer.
Anyone can use it, and from what I’ve read, the Win10 generation of the kit is much easier to use than previous versions (which were pretty bad).
But yea, this stuff is awful.
Checkout things like WinDebloat, Privatezilla, Winaero Tweaker, and LoveWindowsAgain. There’s some overlap between them (as they were built for different purposes), but they all pretty much kill telemetry at the service or installed level (as in remove the components providing telemetry).
Yea, it’s BS you have to do this. And screw MS for this crap.
I think the pro version doesn’t have most of this too. I’ve never seen an ad in w10 and 11
They don’t show explicit banner ads or anything, but every now and then there will be links to “recommended software” in your start menu’s app drawer or the notification thing in the bottom right (not the taskbar, that foldable drawer thing).
You can disable those as well, but not by default.
Candy crush is what they put as “recommended software” if I remember correctly.
One of the many reasons I always run privacy.sexy every time I need to install windows (on both bare metal and inside a VM).
I shall yoink that, thank you very much.
I use O&O ShutUp10++ (oosu10) to do the same thing. Makes Windows feel like Windows, instead of an ad machine.
Whenever people complain about ads I have NO idea what they’re talking about.
Edge will say it’s “maintained by your organization”, which seemed spooky, but that’s just a side-effect from having some privacy.
And the link to OOSU10, in case anyone wants it: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
privacy.sexy
I second this, I use it all the time.
Wait until you get to the screen that asks you if you want to share your data with their 300 friends.
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Maybe also not Ubuntu or RHEL? I heard they also collect telemetries and hard to trun off. Unsure.
The telemetry is opt in so feel free to use them. (Correct me if i am wrong)
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First time?
This is most people’s reaction to using Windows for any reason.
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Let’s narrow it down to normal ppl :) 'Cause those having nothing to hide are enabling enshitification.
Yeah, those granpas asking me to fix their machines are like, “and, what do we do with my OneDrive which I don’t understand what it is?”
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thanks for the link!
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I don’t think so, but this sounds like a super interesting idea. I might try this later!
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I’ve been super busy as of recent, but I’ll try to remember to reply to you if/when I do :)
In the past I’ve heard of power shell scripts you can run to actually disable or uninstall stuff. I wouldn’t trust these toggles to do much at all.
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Absolutely disgusting! Literally the only reason why I still use Windows is the fact many games I play have anti-cheat spyware that doesn’t work on Linux.
Yet another reason I stay away from any game that has online multiplayer PVP teams based setting. I trust anti-cheat as much as I trust that random file you find on [Insert Sketchy Website Link].
While I agree, I almost exclusively play MP games. (I’m just not very much into SP ones, idk)
I got lucky that almost all the multiplayer games I play run under Linux. There’s only one or two that I would need Windows for to play again.
For me it’s this and very specific audio production stuff. Linux audio production has come leaps and bounds over the years, but I need specific vst plugins that I don’t think I could get running in Linux. Also because what I’m doing has very quick turnaround times, I’m worried that if I did get that stuff working it could basically break at any time and I’d be boned.
You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.
Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.
For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.
There is also privacy.sexy. they have a bunch of scripts to do just about everything you want to increase windows privacy. They have a GUI that will help you customize the scripts and you can roll back if you want.
Chris Titus debloat script is the only thing that makes Windows even remotely usable these days.
Thata true, but you if used in a vm you should be careful as preset selections could end up removing functions on your guest vm.
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“You can also opt out, and only have to give me 1 billion.”
This is why if I ever have to get win10 on a VM on my laptop, I am absolutely not updating, ever. Not even gonna give that VM Internet access. Anything I’d need it for, I can passthrough a thumb drive with the files I need. I would hope to God they don’t have a way to hoover up data without internet connection and with no macrohard account connected.
As soon as you start running a pihole on your home network it makes really stop and think and want to eradicate all unnecessary data tracking. Windows was so chatty. Science only knows how much of a consumer profile they create and sell on you for just wanting to use a computer.
Additionally… Smart TV’s are the absolute worst too.
Amazon Kindle, too. If there’s a pihole, it freaks out and starts retrying the mothership in a loop until it drains the damned battery. Airplane Mode quiets this, but I hate how aggressive these devices have become.
What happens if you redirect all traffic to a sinkhole, rather than to 127.0.0.1? Do the devices still freak out when they talk to a web server which returns a 404? Just morbidly curious…
All of this exists on Macs too, doesn’t it?
