I have a Amazon Echo (Alexa) neatest thing I've ever owned, if it, and I say if very loosely it listens to what I say, reports it to NSA, who cares, I don't. Some people go to the extreme with all this privacy concerns in Windows 10, yes I could understand if you were a business of some sort but some of you like Bat.1 for example, lol, make me think this place is a hangout for terrorists, bank robbers and people who want to steal all the Happy Meals at McDonald's. I think it's time some of you got off the grid and moved into your secure bunker in your back yard.
Being you live in Fla you should look beyond yourself and consider American Freedoms as it relates to society. Your passive attitude is what these corps are hoping to rely on. When it comes to freedom it's being taken from the wood pile one stick at a time. When censorship comes ask your Echo what to do ! And again its not about you and you Happy Meals. I cannot understand why so called intelligent people cannot grasp the concept of privacy and security without reverting to the old argument that its not required unless your a criminal of some sort or have something to hide.
@tmf2: I can. Most Americans have never had to deal with freedoms being taken away. They've never been persecuted because of their ethnicity, religious beliefs, or race. (I'm not talking about slavery here so please don't bring it up. It does not even come close to ethnic cleansing.) They've never witnessed the horrors that people from other countries have. Our history books have been doctored for the sake of saving face or painting the USA as "innocents". There are those of us Americans who do know. And we look on with horror. We try to warn people, but we are immediately greeted with a "Tinfoil Hat" moniker, or the same uneducated, clueless garbage of "What does it matter...what could the government do to us?" These same idiots are out there, trying to hire a firm to remove soft-core porn pics of their teenage daughters (or sons ) from the web because they decided to dance naked in front of a web cam that they thought was off, or because they didn't keep up on security bulletins that mentioned how insecure their phones and computers are. Preaching common sense to my peers is something I gave up on a long time ago. They're going to do what they want anyway, so, what's the sense? (for JFKI) All I can do is try not to laugh as I take their money and de-louse their PCs.
For my home desktop I do nothing pertinent enough to care about spying, though I have done just the average person's amount of telemetry removals and the like. Besides, since my enterprise server is just about as secure as possible, and it is also my homes' DNS/DHCP server, it takes care of what I need since all my outgoing traffic is encrypted and incoming traffic must also be encrypted. For my Lenovo ThinkPad business laptop I use Qubes if I'm doing anything like shopping, dealing with bank accounts, my 401k, etc. and I'm not linked to my enterprise server via VPN. If I'm not doing any of the aforementioned, I run LTSB 2016 that's stripped down more than it already is because I much prefer my Opal 2 self-encrypting drive software available for endpoint PBA deployment for Windows (WinMagic SecureDoc). For Linux we basically just have sedutil now, which is fine for the regular person who handles no sensitive data and wants to be able to use a SED's Opal security, but I can't do that. So yeah, for me it's Qubes + LTSB + my server.
Nothing about windows telemetry and those articles on such clickbait websites are mainly meant to lure people to read it and have the ads shown on all reader's pc's:
@Enthousiast: That doesn't look like click bait to me. That looks like a direct quote of someone from Microsoft. Just a thought: If it was untrue, how long do you think that article would have lasted? Don't you think that the lawyers at Microsoft would have forced them to take it down by now? FUD is one thing. The truth is another.
None of which will stop even more threads where it will all be posted again, in addition to the million existing ones where it's all been posted before. Ad infinitum.
Head over to WinAero.com - download Disable Defender (group policy) and Uninstall Cortana. RUN AS ADMIN! Works as of 15019 IP... Run both, reboot as necessary. REMOVED SOFTWARE SUGGESTION Reboot. All gone-ski! The person who created that software released infected versions. They now run a hacking forum and WZor removed them from WZT. The software and the user was banned and removed from MDL. -MDL moderator.