A lot has been said about how Microsoft are invading peoples privacy and ‘stealing’ their personal information when using the new Windows 10 operating system. The fact is that for a number of the new features available in the new system to work, they need to have access to some of your personal information – this really doesn’t mean that they are snooping on you. However, there are also some settings that are turned on by default (if you select the express setup when installing Windows 10) that you may want to tweak, and that is what this article is all about.
Wifi Sense – this is a feature that allows you to automatically share your network connection (and therefore your wifi password) with your contacts. Personally I cant think of a real world reason why you would want to do this – its really not that much easier than simply telling your contact what your wifi password is and we do that all of the time for friends and family.
To turn off this feature, go to Settings | Network & Internet, and click “Manage Wi-Fi Settings”, then click “Turn off Connect to networks shared by my contacts”. If you like the feature and want to leave it turned on its also here that you would select which contacts you want to allow to use it.
Cortana – is one of the new features perviously only seen on Windows phones, she is a personal assistant that can help do things like book appointments into your calendar, in order to do this she needs access to your contacts, location, calendar and even your microphone. To manage Cortana’s settings just type “Cortana” into the start menu search bar.
Privacy Settings – Microsoft will from time to time display personalised advertising in some of the apps that you may download from the store, in addition you can choose whether to send diagnostic information to Microsoft to help them improve how to respond to and spot issues with Windows 10. Other privacy settings can be found in this area, settings around whether your contact information is automatically available to apps that you have downloaded, whether you want to automatically allow apps to access your microphone, even whether you want to allow Windows to broadcast your location to apps that want to know. All of the settings for these features are located in “Privacy Settings” which can be found in Settings | Privacy however you should note that if you really tie down the settings here then that could affect how well your apps are able to work.