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Comment by bjpbakker | Hacker News Reader

According to blog posts and articles on tech sites there still is no way to disable all telemetry on windows 10. I don’t use windows for a long time now so I cannot tell myself.

Anyhow, it is /not/ ok for an OS to spy on their users by default - even if you can disable it manually.

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By the way, is there a list of things that Windows collects about computer/user activity?

-Everything

before anyone else downvotes the parent, take a look at the URL in the sibling comment about what is captured.

they're capturing more data about you than you probably realise exists to be captured.

That's only when you have it set to Full level, which is not the same as Basic level, which is pretty harmless.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/windo...

wow - that is comprehensive and terrifying.

I skimmed the list and these particular ones jumped out at me:

> Movies > URL for a specific two-second chunk of content if there is an error

> Music & TV > Service URL for song being downloaded from the music service -- collected when an error occurs to facilitate restoration of service

> Photos App > File source data -- local, SD card, network device, and OneDrive

That's only when you have it set to Full level, which is not the same as Basic level, which is pretty harmless.

Even though the "basic" telemetry data is quite the list [0], I agree that it's not nearly as intrusive as the "full" set.

> only when you have it set to Full level "you" (probably any users) won't set the level to "full"; this is the default setting (source [1]). MS only offers "basic" as opt-out (which it really is not).

[0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/basic...

[1] - https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/12/configure-telemetry-window...

update: formatting

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