Stop Windows Spying with hosts file

[Applause] all right I'm just kidding with you we're not gonna do one of those notepad tutorials but we all know that Windows spies on you and a previous video I used Wireshark to actually look at all the different addresses that Microsoft connects to without you actually even opening your browser and this is what we found here's a list of the different websites some of which explicitly I'm looking at scorecardresearch.com are third-party data collection sites if we go ahead and visit this website it's actually blocked by ublock origin funnily enough but if we proceed it says this is a service of Full Circle studies Inc part of comscore market research Community a global market research effort that studies reports on internet Trends and behavior so it's no secret that Microsoft is sending your data to third parties in order to study your behavior I wonder for what but ever since that video everybody's been asking me well what can I do to stop my computer from connecting to these sites without my consent a very simple way to do it and I can guarantee you that at the very least if you're sick and tired of this new tab window with a bunch of notifications popping up content and marketing that you didn't ask for you just wanted a simple browser this trick will actually fix that and you will have a clean blank new tab page which alone is worth the effort and what we're going to to do is very simple we're going to take this list of addresses which I'm going to put in the description of this video we're going to copy this and we're going to add it to our host file which is located in C Windows system 32 drivers Etc and there it is hosts so if we go ahead and open it in notepad as you can see this is part of the operating system which contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names so if you've got an IP address and a hostname that's written here which is not preceded by a hash then it tells your system that every time your computer tries to connect to this domain it is going to go to this IP address this is called domain name resolution which is carried out by DNS servers but we can override it on the system and that is exactly what we're going to do so by copying and pasting all of these addresses here what it's telling the system is that each of these addresses that you're seeing here should point to 127.0.0.1 now why have I put in this IP address because this is what is considered a loopback IP address which means the traffic is never going to leave your system so by putting this stuff in our host file and saving it we will ensure that anytime the system tries to resolve this domain name to visit this website it is going to think that the data is actually on the system and therefore the connection is going to fail but before we can go ahead and actually save and make changes to the host file we will need to run notepad as administrator because this is a protected file so if we just try to go ahead and save it it's not going to allow us to do that so what you need to do is you need to open up notepad as admin so right click run as administrator and then from here you need to go to file open and select the host file here after making sure you've selected all files because this is not fault type txt and then copy and paste Ctrl s that's saved and now watch this magic we've got a completely blank new tab page if this is not working for you it's probably just because of the cache and then you can go ahead and clear your browsing data and the best part of this is the useful things about Microsoft still work so for example if you wanted to go to bing.com for whatever reason I don't know why you would want to do that but if you wanted to use the chat GPT here whatever you can still do all of that the internet still works it's uh just you don't have to see this if we take a look at our traffic in warshark our system is still making all the same requests that it was including the infamous scorecardresearch.com but of course it is no longer connecting to the right IP address so these requests are going to waste which is why when you open the browser you don't see anything you don't even see the settings to turn things on and off it is that good it's actually been quite a relief for me personally because I always got annoyed by those little note notifications that cram in so even if you went to focused mode turned everything off you open Edge and there's still that annoying little notification every few days or it would switch back to show you a little bit of the news after you update but guess what this actually salsa but if you're really into this idea of stopping as much data collection Telemetry for Microsoft as possible there are a whole lot of approaches you can take their tools that'll allow you to turn off specific quote-unquote features that Microsoft has to collect your data you can obviously also use your router to stop certain connections but hey this is a really quick and simple tweak that can massively improve your experience on windows at least on edge by giving you a clean browser tab imagine that please like and share this video if you found it helpful if you're sick and tired of the large tech company spying on you you should definitely check out the sponsor of this video enter next a fully private and encrypted Suite of cloud storage solutions they'll help you eliminate the dependence on Google Drive OneDrive iCloud and the rest you can actually sign up right away for a free account get up to 10 GB for free but if you use the link in the description you're going to get a lifetime Cloud subscription imagine that you're going to be able to get two terabytes or five terabytes or 10 terabytes of data for Life you'll never have to pay a subscription for cloud storage again I'm actually currently hosting all of my uh lab stuff on the internet's drive and as you can see it's very easy to navigate it's got the same kind of folder system that every other cloud service has you can look at 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Channel: The PC Security Channel

Views: 554,043

Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, anti malware, ransomware, trojan, virus, PUP, best antivirus, best internet security, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, best EDR, EDR, stop windows spying, is windows spyware, windows 11 spyware, stop windows 11 spyware, stop microsoft spying, blank edge tab, stop edge spying, stop windows telemetry

Id: IJr2DcffquI

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023