Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 10 has fulfilled all the expectations that PC users had from it, but some of the users are still unhappy about it. They are concerned about the user’s privacy and how some of the Windows 10 components are dialing back home to report the user data collected in form of diagnostics. These privacy conscious users became so unhappy with the situation that they ended up creating a tracking disabler tool for Windows 10. This tool can effectively disable the services known for user data collection, clear the diagnostics data and block the known tracking servers using the HOSTS file.
Here is how you can use the Windows 10 tracking disabler tool to prevent Windows from dialing home:
- Download the Windows 10 tracking disable tool from the github page https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking/. Save it anywhere on your PC, but saving on Windows desktop is better as you can easily find it there.
- Right-click on the downloaded run.exe file and select Run as administrator from the context-menu.
- In the Windows 10 Tracking Disable tool, you can select the items that you want to disable or delete. You can choose to disable Telemetry and some of the tracking services. You can also choose to clear the diagnostic data and block some of the tracking related domains in the HOSTS file.
- Finally click on the Go Private button to make changes to your Windows 10 system. You may have to reboot your PC before some of these changes make take any affect.
If you are a privacy conscious person and think that Microsoft has no business collecting your usage data, then you can use the Windows 10 Tracking Disable too to prevent all this data collection by Microsoft in Windows 10. However, the data collected by Microsoft is only for improving features of the operating system and I would not really bother about this little bit of diagnostics data used by Microsoft engineers.
All of these apps are extremely misleading. They do NOT prevent all of
the telemetry from being blocked. Not a single one of them do, or all of
them combined for that matter.
Hi Trish! This is my first comment, although I’m a regular reader.
I’ve explored that tool on my Windows 10, and I’ve one problem: the list of blocked sites also included, in the host’s file, IP addresses. Host’s file is used to resolve names, not to block IP’s.
I have inserted these IP’s on a new rule for Outbound traffic in Windows 10 native firewall… Hopping to block them! But, at this point, I’m considering a Linux based firewall to test furthermore.
Third party firewall’s might also be necessary to increase privacy on Windows 10.
Thanks for your great work… See u soon! 😉