Skip to main content

Privacy Settings with Windows 10 Setup

So... Windows 10 really likes to share your data with Microsoft and others. Most of the below settings are adapted from an Ars Tech article (found HERE) plus my own personal experience with the setup of Windows 10. Just note that with increased privacy and/or security settings comes a decrease in features (such as disabling Cortana). You don't have to do all of these, but some of them I'd highly recommend.

On the instillation screen you'll see a large button that says "Use Express Settings". Instead look for the small "Customize Settings" button and select that.













The first customization page has settings for personalization, targeted advertising and location tracking. Go ahead and disable everything on this page.

Inline image 1

The second page has some useful options. Turn off the following options:
Predictive Web Browsing; Connecting to open Wi-Fi hot spots; and Wi-Fi Sense

Finish the install as directed. The rest of the changes will need to be made after the install is completed.

In the new "Settings" app select the Privacy button and flip any option available to OFF except for SmartScrren Filter.

Inline image 2

Next, Select the Feedback option in the bottom left and change the Feedback frequency to "never" or Basic Health and Performance".

Next, go back to Settings (back arrow in top left) and Select the Update & Security > Windows Update > Advanced Options > Choose how update are delivered. From here disable the sharing feature completely by flipping the toggle button to OFF:

Inline image 4

Now, hit the Start button and start typing "Cortana". Click on the cog icon to bring up Cortana's settings, Then select the toggle button to turn Cortana OFF:

Inline image 3

And that *should* do it for now...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using Python for GPG/PGP File Encryption - Part 1

So, this will be the start of a series that will build a python script for GPG/PGP file encryption. In this post, we'll look at installing gnupg for python and using python to setup the keystore, create a private key, exporting the associated public key, and importing a public key. Now everything done here can be done with simple gnupg commands, but learning how to do this with python will help in understanding the script we'll be building to complete file encryption. I will be covering non-python gnupg commands in a future post. Additionally, the folks at the python-gnupg site over at pythonhosted.org have done a really great job at documenting everything (link to their site at the bottom). The stuff I'll be going over will be more of a start-to-finish for anyone that may get lost in the muck of doing stuff with python. Full Disclosure #1: Any key identifier throughout the series of posts is FICTITIOUS and DOES NOT represent any real key, either associated with myself or...

Windows Server 2008: Log on as batch job

From time to time, I have to set up some scheduled tasks that required a dedicated account to run. And when doing so, I'll usually forget that the dedicated account usually isn't given any more permissions than what it needs to complete the task at hand. So, after setting up the task, Windows will usually yell at me and say "The account needs batch job rights". So here's how to grant batch job permissions on your server. Go to your start menu, and start searching for Local Security Policy In the left pane of the MMC that opens up, expand Local Policies, and highlight User Rights Assignment. Now, in the left right pane, locate "Log on as a batch job" and double click it. In the properties window that opens up, add the user or group that needs this permission. I find that if you have multiple service accounts running different tasks on the same server, it's easier to just add a group verses the individual a...

Replacing rsyslog with syslog-ng on RHEL 6.5

So...I had a piece of monitoring software that didn't play nice with the RHEL default rsyslog for log collection. The software was developed to only work with syslog-ng. I'll be going over the steps that I took, that worked for me, in replacing rsyslog with syslog-ng. I would imagine that these same steps should work for any Linux system similar to RHEL (Fedora, CentOS, etc.). For others (like Debein based distributions), I would need to look into that (coming in a future update to this post). First, remove rsyslog. You will need to keep the dependencies as they will be needed for syslog-ng: sudo rpm -e --nodeps rsyslog Next we will need to add the EPEL repository (more info can be found HERE ): wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.rpm sudo yum repolist That last command will list all the installed repositories. You are simply verifying that the EPEL package has been installed. Now that we fi...