Windows 10: Windows 10 and privacy and performance concerns

@ ahr10 - Thank you for the reply and the link to MS, it helped me a lot to understand (hopefully) what this is all about. Much appreciated!

I've decided to ditch the idea of using any 3rd party tools like ShutUp10 or Anti-Beacon, instead I'll just turn everything off under Privacy settings, set "MS spying" to Basic level and disable Cortana and Automatic Updated in the Group policy editor.

That should suffice, I think (I hope).

I have an additional question: people who set the telemetry to "Full" - are their Gmail and other passwords and personal data like documents, photos etc. sent to Microsoft? Like, for real?

And another question regarding the Ten Forums - how do I unsubscribe from a thread? I'm getting notifications (e-mails) when somebody replies to this thread even though I've unsubscribed. Please help.

 

Most of what Microsoft gathers information about you is for statistics and information on how they can improve their products and fix bugs in Windows 10. It isn't going to send this information so that your passwords can be hacked or something like that. They'd only probably target you specifically if you were doing illegal things on the Internet, for example.

However, if you do want to kill the spying (as well as do some other tweaks) try out WinAero Tweaker (search 'WinAero' in Bing and it is the first result).

To answer the question about unsubscribing from threads, I think you can do it via the User CP.

 

I have unsuscribed again, we'll see what happens. Thanx for the suggestion but I don't need WinAero Tweaker.

 

ShutUp10 and Anti-Beacon are excellent programs: they simplify things and they don't damage your system in any way. They also enable some privacy features which can't be set via the Settings menu.
On 'Full' telemetry personal data such as documents and photos may be sent if your system crashes because of the document or photo, or if the document/photo was in the background when the system crashed or if the document/photo is included in one of the crash dumps or in some other scenarios.

In terms of your passwords for things like Gmail then the answer is: they may be sent to Microsoft if you've got keystroke logging enabled (to "improve services" Microsoft tell us *sarc) but, again, if you've set your level to 'Basic' then you're okay. As an additional protection I recommend you set-up 2SV so that even if your password falls into the wrong hands it's useless without your unique one-time password.

Even though Microsoft say they anonymise telemetry data I don't believe it's true anonymity so I'd very strongly recommend against setting your telemetry to 'Full'.

 

Thank you, again.

Everything under Privacy set to OFF, Cortana and Automatic Windows updates disabled and Diagnostics set to BASIC. That's it for me, no additional tools or whatever.

I found clarity and am happy with your answer, considering me, this thread is "solved". *Smile