Tutorial Disable Windows 10 Spying

There has been a fair amount of controversy on Windows 10 and the personalization that comes with it. As you may recall from search engines such as Google, your experience is personalized by search tracking, which in turn allows the advertisters and potentially attackers to exploit your online habits. In the latest release of Windows 10 this has become an issue as all the "spying" features are enabled by default (personalized ads, cortana, location services, etc.), so I am going to make a short tutorial on how to make your usage more private. 


1. If it seems like it is tracking you it probably is, disable it.
2. Disable Cortana, she may seem like your friend, but she reports all your searches back to Microsoft just as Siri does on iOS.
3. Disable Personalized ads, they track your usage and browsing habits. This is also reported to advertisers. 
4.Use local accounts, instead of syncing your information with a Microsoft account opt to use a local account. It seems kind of obvious but in order for the information to pass from one device to another through your account it has to travel on the internet, thus posing a possible risk.
5.Disable location services.



While these are the main features used to spy I recommend you update Windows in all versions to the latest available release as it would be the most secure in the light of recent data breaches. As for the NSA spy tools, they have been patched since early Januray 2017, as such you would also need to update your OS to the latest available version in order to patch these potential exploits. Hope this helps someone along the line!

Tutorial Disable Windows 10 Spying