Windows 10 is different from the earlier versions of Windows operating systems in the sense that Microsoft has decided to spy on the users as they have added so many features and services that sort of collect the data related to how you use your PC and then send it to Microsoft servers. As a consequence, there are tons of tools that experienced developers have created in order to remove or disable these components. We have covered very good tools like DWS, Ashampoo Antispy or Spybot Anti-beacon before. And now there is another tool called Blackbird is available for the Windows 10 users.
Blackbird is a comprehensive tool that removes all the extraneous apps from Windows 10 and makes changes to some of the Windows settings through Registry and through various command line tools to block the background processes responsible for spying on your PC usage. It can be used on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as well where it will prevent the Get Windows 10 popup that annoys many people who have decided not to upgrade to Windows 10 because their PC hardware is not compatible, because they are not happy with all the Windows 10 spying or for some other reason.
Using Blackbird is extremely easy. It is a portable command line interface (CLI) application for Windows. You can just download it (there are separate tools for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows) and then you can launch it by double-clicking on the downloaded file. It will require administrative privileges and you might see a UAC window. It will take a few seconds to scan your system and will show you whether your PC is secured or not.
It shows you the security status for autologgers, scheduled tasks, services, privacy, telemetry, GWX and WGA. If the green status message is shown for these components then you are already secure. But a red status is alert and you have to take action by pressing any key. After changes have been made to your PC, Blackbird will ask you to restart the computer after which all the changes will take effect.
You can download Blackbird from http://www.getblackbird.net/.