How To Disable Windows 10 Telemetry

Put yourself back in control of your privacy

Withdata breachesandmalware infectionson the rise, taking your data privacy seriously is now more essential than ever. Without adequate protection in place, you’re leaking data about yourself to every website you visit and to every app you install—even to Microsoft itself, thanks to the Windows 10 telemetry system.

As part of its efforts to help troubleshoot the Windows 10 user experience, Microsoft logs data about the apps and features you use, your system information, your system settings, and more. If you’re worried about this data being shared, you can disable Windows 10 telemetry by following these steps.

What Is Windows 10 Telemetry?

Windows 10 isn’t the first Windows release to collect and share system data with itself, but Microsoft has certainly increased the amount of data it collects and shares in this release. Telemetry, as the practice is called, is how Microsoft does this.

Along with your general privacy settings, such as the data Windows collects to help serve advertisements or filter adult content, Microsoft also collects location data, information on your Windows usage, and other under-the-hood diagnostic information to help monitor and troubleshoot Windows across millions of PCs.

You can see the benefit for Microsoft, but there are some serious privacy concerns to be considered for the standard Windows user here. Microsoft has made it extremely hard to disable Windows 10’s telemetry settings for Windows 10 Home users, instead giving users the option to limit it to only basic data collection.

If you’re using Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise or Education, then you can disable telemetry entirely by editing the registry or using the Group Policy Editor, but this option is disabled for many users.

The choice is yours: you can leave telemetry enabled, and allow Microsoft to collect various bits of information about you, your location, and your activities. Alternatively, you can set telemetry to minimal settings (or disable it entirely) to cut Microsoft off from its data collection activities and put you back in control.

How To Limit Windows 10 Telemetry Data

As we’ve mentioned, Microsoft has prevented Windows 10 Home users from being able to completely disable telemetry data. If you want to limit your telemetry data sharing, you can do so from theWindows Settingsmenu.

Under theDiagnostic and usage datasection, you can change the various data collection levels. At the moment, these include options forbasic data collection, which limits the information sent to Microsoft to only include system settings, hardware, and whether or not your system is working correctly.

Alternatively, you could choosefull data collection, which sends all diagnostic data, including data on the websites you visit, apps and features you use, device health, and additional error data for troubleshooting.

In a future release of Windows 10, these settings will be changed torequired diagnostic data(to replacebasic data collection) andoptional diagnostic data(to replacefull data collection). The settings should remain the same, but with replaced setting names.

How To Complete Disable Telemetry In Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise and Education Editions Using GPEditor

While it isn’t an option for Windows 10 Home users, it is possible to disable telemetry data sharing for Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise and Education users.

There are two ways to do this. You can change your telemetry settings using theGroup Policy Editoror by modifying the Windows Registry using the Windows Registry editor.

How To Complete Disable Telemetry In Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise and Education Editions Using Registry Editor

If you want to completely disable telemetry in Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise or Education, you can also use the Windows Registry Editor to do this.

Windows 10 Home users can also do this to change their telemetry settings, but you’ll only be able to limit data collection, rather than stop it completely. For Windows 10 Home users, it’s best to use the Windows 10 Settings menu instead.

Once the value has been edited, the telemetry setting you’ve chosen will be active. You can close the Registry Editor at this point.

Protecting Your Data On Windows 10

If you decide to disable Windows 10 telemetry, you’ll be limiting the amount of personalized support Microsoft can offer to help troubleshoot issues you come across using its operating system. There are no risks to disabling telemetry, however, so if you prefer to limit the data being shared, you should disable it.

Of course, there are other ways you can protect your data while you’re using Windows. You should first check to see if your data has been compromised online and, if it has, change your passwords immediately. If you’re really worried, considerencrypting your hard driveto stay in total control of your data.

Ben Stockton is a freelance technology writer based in the United Kingdom. In a past life, Ben was a college lecturer in the UK, training teens and adults. Since leaving the classroom, Ben has taken his teaching experience and applied it to writing tech how-to guides and tutorials, specialising in Linux, Windows, and Android. He has a degree in History and a postgraduate qualification in Computing.Read Ben’s Full Bio

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