Well the title says it, I got a shock installing Opera 12.16 in Win8.1 64bit - it's so porous! I installed it on this laptop from which I have not yet proceeded to uninstall all the uninstallable apps, so it still has all the usual Win8 apps Tiles in its "Start dashboard" (I use this phrase to avoid confusion with the Start Menu, another topic entirely) Just after I installed Opera, I set google.com as the homepage, and I did not put any bookmark, except google.com. I set Opera to open to its tile dashboard, (this version no longer offers you the choice to open to a blank page, and I did not want it to open automatically to Google, I don't want to go to Google unless I specifically need to google something ). I did my business on the web on the first visit, with all privacy options preset in Opera Preferences (don't remember urls visited, empty cache on exit, delete new cookies on exit etc.). But when I restarted Opera, its dashboard was full of tiles from interactive programs showing me ongoing stuff, it seems they are the same as on the Win8 Tiles. And I'm of course wondering what info they got from my last web visit on Opera, and how come they installed themselves into this new installation of Opera, how come it is so porous to the OS ??? It's awful! What is happening with Opera, what is it doing and how to stop Win8 from putting its tentacles into it?