Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
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Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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If I remember correctly, Pro should give you access to group policies (making configuration a tad less painful compared to fiddling in the registry), stuff such as Windows Sandbox/MDAG (basically, throwaway VMs you can run executables/Edge in), as well as Bitlocker encryption.
You cannot turn off required diagnostics on Windows 11 Home or Pro. You can see it yourself by firing up a Windows Pro or Home VM, editing the relevant setting in the registry or group policy, then taking a look at wireshark traffic - you should still see traffic to telemetry endpoints that Microsoft has listed in their documentation. This confirms what their documentation already says about this setting:
This also applies to many third party tools which claim to stop windows telemetry. Since I'm reasonably sure they work by editing the registry, they would be no more effective than simply turning off optional diagnostics in the GUI. So you end up giving yet another random app admin access for no real gain.
That being said, imo the required OS diagnostics Windows collects tends to be pretty basic in comparison to all the FUD that's spread about it being a literal backdoor. You can see for yourself by opening the diagnostic data viewer app and seeing what info is there.
The other main problems (at least from my fiddling around in a VM with
mitmproxyand wireshark as well as reading various articles) are:Windows Spotlight sending back similar data compared to required diagnostics - but if you're on Home/Pro where you can't turn it off anyways, this is irrelevant.
Forced Microsoft Login with a lot of cloud syncing stuff opted in by default - bypassable, but is somewhat troublesome. You can also just select the domain join option when installing Windows Pro to get around this.
Bing start menu search (needs a group policy or regedit to disable).
Edge's optional features and Windows Security's Smartscreen constantly leaking stuff such as browsing history (these can be disabled easily enough, fwiw).
Edit: I just realized you were talking about 10 and not 11, still, a lot of what I wrote about diagnostic data is applicable to both of them.