Stop Windows Spying

so does Windows spy on you in one of our most recent videos we analyzed all of the data from a brand new laptop and we found a lot of sketchy sites including third-party data collection sources that our computer was connecting to without our consent since then that video has been widely cited by sources like Linus Tech tips neowin and various blogs on the internet the ads that you pay for the ads ads and a lot of you have been requesting a follow-up where we go over this data and try to use it to block Microsoft's Telemetry now one of the methods that has been proposed is obviously to log the queries to look at the destination addresses that your computer is connecting to find the sketchy web servers get their address and then perhaps try to block those individually using a firewall but this is not the method I would recommend and there are several reasons for that first of all the destination addresses can change not to mention you still have the components running on your system instead what you want to do is likely shut down the windows apparatus that is responsible for reaching out to these addresses my preferred way to do that is using a couple of tools and I'm going to go over them right now and we're going to see what impact it has by doing another network analysis via Wireshark and the first tool I'm going to talk about is oendo shot up 10. I know it says 10 in the name but it does have version for Windows 11 and you can go ahead and download it what this does is allows you to have a very heavy amount of control on the Windows registry and group policy and turn off a lot of components that are responsible for collecting sharing data with Microsoft and other third-party sources as well as components that might be annoying to you from a user experience perspective it is a bit complicated so we're gonna go over the UI so you've got two settings here current user and local machine now it's important to understand the distinction current user means only the user that's logged in right now so any changes you make here will be erased if you create a new user account also it might not have certain settings that are applicable to the whole machine regardless of what the current user likes so you want to start off with local machine and as you can see I've already turned on most of the Privacy handles we've disabled sharing of handwriting data disable sharing of handwriting error reports inventory collector camera in the log on screen advertising ID advertisements 5 Bluetooth Windows customer experience Improvement program Windows aren't reporting the only thing I have not disabled is Biometrics and the reason for that is if you are using a computer that has a biometric login like using your fingerprint it's not going to work if you turn this off similarly you've got a lot of settings under activity history and Clipboard app privacy so this is where you start getting into trade-offs with privacy and functionality but there's a lot of stuff like the stuff over here you can pretty much turn all of this off without affecting any functionality in Windows all you're doing is reducing the amount of data that you are sending back to Microsoft and other third-party sources as we discovered now if we scroll down you've got some security settings as well and once again disable Telemetry here Microsoft is quite sneaky they have Telemetry baked into almost every component so you have to do this individually same thing on Microsoft Edge so you have a ton of settings here you have to disable personalizing advertising search news and other services suggestions from local providers shopping assistant Edge Bar smart screen filter now I don't recommend disabling this if you're using Windows Defender I do not but basically if you use this all of your url data is going to be analyzed by Microsoft again that data has to be sent over the web so if you don't want that to happen and you've got better Solutions on your system which of course if you want to find out more about what you can replace Windows Defender with you're on the right channel check out the other videos on the PC security Channel you'll learn a lot but basically you want to go for these settings and turn off everything that you do not think you will ever use similarly I never use Cortana so I've turned off everything over here you can also turn off location services but again I have not done that because you might want to use certain apps that use location services but it's also important to note that these are not by any means recommended settings for you you should actually go for these yourself so if there's anything in here that you don't think you'll use so for example if you don't want location services never use maps on your PC just turn all of this off I mean on which is going to turn the Microsoft data collection off now user Behavior again we've got application Telemetry here so Microsoft is collecting data about how you use your applications and sending that data back to whatever sources they like so they can study you you don't want that disable application Telemetry now if you are doing any kind of Diagnostics you may not want to disable log collection but let's be honest I have never used Diagnostics or support from Microsoft if I have an issue with my computer I just have to Google until I find somebody else who's had that issue and then use their solution so if you use Windows the same way I do you can turn off any kind of diagnostic or log collection because it's not doing anything to help you similarly on Windows update you can disable peer-to-peer connections for Windows update some of these settings will also enhance your security because you're just connecting to fewer Network addresses if that makes sense you can also use this to defer updates in case there's a really annoying upgrade that's being suggested to you or pushed on you you can also do this for driver updates if Windows keeps downloading a driver you don't actually need or want of course I wouldn't recommend disabling updates because you do get security updates this way and this will impact that now going back to current user we've got a lot of other settings for example feedback reminders so if you're sick and tired of Windows telling you to submit feedback even though you paid for your operating system and you have no obligation to participate in surveys for Microsoft you can turn this on you can disable tips tricks and suggestions while using Windows don't we all love that you can also disable the extension of Windows search via Bing what this is is basically the web search that happens when you type window does s so if you turn this on it's going to get rid of all of the online search functionality here so if you just want to search your PC it's going to do that I don't have that enabled and the reason for that is a lot of times I will use the windows calculator like so or I might do something like currency conversion this just seems a very convenient way to do it but if you don't want it you can always go ahead and disable it right here you can also disable automatic installation of recommended apps but there you have it this is one of the tools in one of the ways in which you can greatly reduce the amount of telemetry your system participates in but this is the PC security channel so we need to test this and figure out if this actually had an impact in terms of the addresses that we are connecting to in Wireshark via network analysis but before we do that there's one more bonus tool and that is the ultimate Windows tweaker this is another amazing tool that I highly recommend using it's by the windows club and it allows you to again customize is various aspects of windows in a way that Microsoft simply does not a prime example of this is if you go under customization and restore Windows 10 styled context menus you can get rid of the pointless context menu that Windows 11 has added and go back to this old style context menu where you actually have all your settings so for example if I right click here you can see I've got 7-Zip power rename all of the options I want instead of the minimal context menu that you see with Windows 11 but this video is about stopping Microsoft spying on you so let's go into security and privacy as you can see under primary functioning you've got the ability to disable a lot of different parts of the system you can also use this to disable error reporting in here Windows Defender if you don't use it OneDrive if you don't use it user tracking but the best settings are under privacy so here once again you can disable Telemetry Biometrics if you like Windows update sharing feedback requests advertising ID you can also use it to disable Cortana Wi-Fi Sense app access to location camera messages and so on since we have two different tools that we're using some of the settings look kind of weird like they're turned on in one not turned on in another as long as the changes are implemented within your registry and your group policy you're all good some of these things you can do manually but I highly recommend using these tools since they do an amazing job of giving you a user-friendly UI to apply all of these tweaks another thing I really like about Ono shut up 10 that I forgot to mention is that you can actually go ahead and Export to your settings so if you're using this on multiple computers once you have found the perfect settings for you you can export them into a file like you see here and then you can just load this up and it's going to remember all of your settings you just need a couple of executables and you can go around on every computer applying your settings in a couple of seconds by just loading up your config file really good functionality highly recommend using both of these tools enough talk let's look at the results so right now I'm running a war shark on my main system and as you can see there's still a lot of requests to Microsoft however a very important distinction is that we do not have any of the third party addresses that you saw in my previous video all the sites I see are directly linked to Microsoft they're a lot more explicit in terms of what they are and you have to keep in mind I'm still keeping a lot of the web functionality on like the search in the start menu and I'm still using a Microsoft account if you don't do that you can probably reduce this even further so I hope this guide helps you to take back some control of your windows 11 or Windows 10 system please like and share this video If you enjoyed it and now to our sponsor speaking of spying are you tired of Google spying on you and collecting your data you might say well what choice do we have Bing that's even worse even Dr go is sharing user data these days but you do have a choice you always have a choice and that is why I'm super excited to announce the sponsor of today's video Neva a brand new search engine built on a different concept as they are not going to do advertising and they're not going to sell your data well then how are they going to make money you might ask by providing premium services to you which is how it should be they've got a free search engine that everyone can use but they've also got a Premium plan that comes with a password manager a VPN and premium search features and you can get that for the low price of about four pounds per month but what about the search results Google has got its magic sauce so how are they going to compete on that well actually and if you go ahead and test out their search functionality destroy the PC security Channel well we've got some suggestions here it's got tpsc GitHub YouTube not bad and when we search for tpsc we've got our website first result YouTube channel second you've also got the option to look at videos and boom these are all videos from our Channel if you go ahead and sign in you actually get a customized home page and in case you're curious the premium password manager you get included is Dashlane and the premium VPN is bitdefender is say we do a search for a question like this so how to open a fallen python its AI is actually going to give you an answer very similar to chat GPT but more importantly you've got a small snippet from a website so this is an actual Source but instead of having to go to the website you've got the result from the website in this little preview window and you can actually see all of this code directly in the search box so not only can he compete with search engines like Google it can actually do some things that Google can't so if you've been on the edge trying to find an alternative for private search but didn't want to give up all of the personalization and features that Google has here's your chance you can finally move to a search engine where you're the customer and not the product anyone can start using Neva today using the link in the description please go ahead and create an account show them that this business model can work if you don't like the dystopian future we're headed towards this is a way to have a real impact just click the link in description create an account and thank them for sponsoring the PC security Channel I hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much for watching this is Leo and as always stay informed stay secure

Channel: The PC Security Channel

Views: 478,501

Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, anti malware, ransomware, trojan, virus, best antivirus, best internet security, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, best EDR, EDR, stop windows spying, windows 11 spying, is windows spyware, remove windows tracking, debloat windows, Stop Windows Telemetry, Stop windows tracking, fix windows privacy, data collection

Id: VU9L0udNV9M

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023