Notations From the Grid: On Privacy & Protection (Cavaet Emptor)

We wanted to take this opportunity to feature this here for all to take under advisement:


For those Win7 & Win8 users that feel they enjoy too much privacy and too
much security, these features have been back-ported to both Win7 and Win8.

From the Win10 EULA (110-pages, 40,000 words) and MS Privacy Policy:

>
> Your privacy is important to us ...
>
> We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your
> content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications
> or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so
> is necessary.
>

If you slog through MS's instructions how-to turn-off SOME (not all) of the
telemetry/spyware ... MS will automagically re-enable it. Frequently. Silently.

What is MS collecting and forwarding to the MS Mothership?

- Contacts (name, postal address, email, tele, organization, business addr, titles)
- Usernames, passwords & password hints
- Age & gender
- Interests (sports, stocks, finance, etc.)
- Appls installed & usage history
- Calendar entries
- Email content
- Instant message content
- Tele usage/contact info
- Search history
- Web history
- Audio (search, Cortana, etc)

I have installed Spybot's (free) "Anti-Beacon" utility on my personally owned
systems. I have been running it for several weeks on Win7 & Win8 with no
problems.

Download:

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

This video covers the topic in considerable detail:

https://youtu.be/u1kGMCfb2xw