Turn Off Cortana Completely in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

A service, a product, a bribe. Something of tangible value.

If my data is being taken and I'm not interested in the service being provided in return, I feel like I'm being ripped off.

As for the part in their Privacy Statement (https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/), which boils down to that, it's this section:

"Finally, we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:

1. comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;

2. protect our customers, for example to prevent spam or attempts to defraud users of our products, or to help prevent the loss of life or serious injury of anyone;

3. operate and maintain the security of our products, including to prevent or stop an attack on our computer systems or networks; or

4. protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services - however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement."

"Access, transfer, disclose, and preserve" is what I summarized as "complete access", as that is everything you can do with data, except maybe destroy it, but that doesn't make much sense in a privacy-context.

And then "when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary", that's the part where you sign away the rights for Microsoft to do that whenever the fuck they want.

I mean, they list a few points, for what it would be necessary, so you might be able to make a case in court, that Microsoft could never have had that good faith belief for one of those points, but then one of those points is "protect the [...] property of Microsoft". And without a doubt would Microsoft have a good faith belief that selling your personal data is necessary to protect their property.

DuckDuckGo's implementation [0] seems more robust to me, but if you don't use it as your default search engine, it's probably easier anyways to just click on the first link in the Google search results (or use Cortana obviously).

And yeah, you do need to leave the tab open until it ends. I don't see that as that big of a flaw as you do, since most people have a browser open all the time anyways, but yeah, whatever floats your boat. Certainly isn't terrible to have another option for it.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5+minute+timer

The difference between them is that Microsoft uses an Dark-Pattern to obscure the "Not now" option by placing it off to the left in normal font styling where as the "Next" button is a proper button.

I have not experienced any nagging to activate Cortana on any of the 7 devices I have it installed on. I disabled Cortana during the setup screen on each and that was the end of it.

Now a recent update added the Search button back on tablets that you can't get rid of, which is annoying, but Cortana still isn't enabled. If you click on the button it's just the bog standard Windows Search. Someone mentioned this was part of the Anniversary update but neither of my tablets have enough drive space to perform the Anniversay update but I still have the search button in the task bar. Either way it's lame.

"Children! 10 more minutes, then we're turning screens off. Hey Siri! Set a timer for ten minutes."

Much easier than fiddling with the crown to set a 10 minute timer.