W10Privacy

W10Privacy: An effective solution to prevent Windows from tracking your online activities that turns off related settings

By now Windows 10 is renowned for collecting a lot of user data, which includes your browsing habits among other activities. Nevertheless, not everyone is comfortable with Microsoft freely accessing such personal information and for this reason tools like W10Privacy have been created.

This small application makes it very easy to disable settings and elements which track your browsing habits even if you don’t have a lot of experience regarding to customizing your Windows OS. As always, we recommend creating a system restore point before using any kind of application which can change the system settings.

W10Privacy places at your disposal a list of all the activity-tracking system settings that can be toggled off. These include the SmartScreen Filter, prevent apps from accessing your calendar messages and account information, turning off location details and even stop applications from using your advertising ID.

What’s more, the program lets you toggle off the option to show the password, speech recognition or your camera from being usable on the lock screen. Also, W10Privacy can be configured to block IP addresses of various Microsoft telemetry servers via firewall rules or by adding them to the HOSTS file.

Regarding apps, the program can disable saving forms and passwords in Microsoft Edge browser, disable third-party cookies and turn off the SmartScreen Filter. It can also prevent OneDrive from automatically launching at system boot and remove the application from Explorer’s sidebar as well as disable it’s capability to store your files.