Disabling Windows 10’s Built-in Spyware and P2P Update Sharing

Alec Meer:

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.

There’s a whole list of things you may want to do in Alec’s article. I disagree with his suggestion to stop using a Microsoft account for login, it’s a great feature that certain settings are shared between my laptop and desktop Windows installations, Cortana is similarly useful, but everything else is sound.

Additionally, the peer-to-peer sharing of Windows updates is gross just like the Blizzard updater and should be disabled.

To disable p2p sharing of Windows updates, do this:

1. Go to the Settings program from the start menu:
2. Click Update & security on this screen:
3. Click Advanced Options:
4. Click Choose how updates are delivered:
5. Click the first toggle option and set it to off:

Now your computer won’t share updates with others.