Welcome back to final part of ‘How to Stay Anonymous Online ’ series. In Part 1 and Part 2 we covered tips and tricks which can be used in Google services and Facebook to safeguard your online privacy. Today we’ll look into Windows 10, the most used operating system worldwide. Due to its always-connected nature, and there is no telling on the amount of data collected.
Here are few methods to reduce and limit the amount of data shared.
How to Stay Anonymous Online in Windows
1.Change Basic settings
The amount and type of data collected can be reduced by proactively checking the basic settings of system. At TechArea, we already did a guide on controlling the notification and adverts in Windows 10 which will further increase your online privacy.
To change basic settings, Go to Settings->Privacy -> General Option
There are various privacy options presented, check them and toggle ‘off’ which ever not required. There is a link to Microsoft website to verify and control the advertising served. You can check that and disable personalized ads if needed.
Go to Settings-> Privacy -> Feedback & diagnostics
Change the frequency of feedback to ‘Never’ and usage of diagnostics data to ‘Basic’ level to restrict feedback information to an absolute minimum.
2. Use Spybot Anti-Beacon
Apart from basic settings, application like Spybot Anti-Beacon is required to completely block everything that going back to Microsoft.
Download the free Spybot Software
After installation, Turn on ‘Full protection
If any specific feature stops working in system after blocking, try undo on that to make sure of no other impact.
3.Camera and Microphone settings
With always connected setup, you will never know which app uses your camera and Microphone and collect the data from it. As heard earlier, people tend to paste a sticker over camera and mute the microphone when not in use.
Go to Settings -> Privacy – > Camera
Here, select the apps which does need camera access or you don’t prefer them to use it.
Go to Settings -> Privacy – > Microphone
Same as Camera settings, toggle off the apps which doesn’t require Microphone to be used.
4.Modify Speech, Inking and Typing settings
This setting is used to control how your personal data is sent to Microsoft for use with Cortana. Microsoft Cortana will collect your voice data to personalize Cortana.So proven this
Go To Settings -> Privacy – > Speech ,Inking, and Typing Settings
Disable the ‘Stop getting to know me’ to prevent Cortana from collection further information.
To erase the already collected data, one can go to Bing using your Microsoft account and perform the same.
5.Update Location Settings
The location details shared by OS can again be reduced by following the below methods.
Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location
Finally, if you are person who uses location specific service often the option share ‘General location’ can be enabled.
Other Tips:
Here are few other relevant tips and ideas to be anonymous
1.Disable third party cookies
Almost all decent websites will have these to track user activity, so its advisable to remove this cookie collection and remove it altogether.
2.Incognito mode in browser
Always better to use the Incognito browser for web surfing. This will prevent data leakage compared to normal browsing.
Apart from these, we also recommend from not using email marketing,subscribe for updates etc.
So hope you guys enjoyed the Part 3 of ‘How to Stay Anonymous Online ’ series. With this we conclude the series. Please provide your comments and feedback below which will help me to provide more such ‘How to’ guides.As the below saying goes
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
– Bill Gates