[catnipman]

And yet, no, W10 STILL transmits data after “everything is turned off”.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

[Dr. Sivana]

Thanks for the link to the arstechnica article.

With all of those disclosed URLs, I can go to STAGE 2, disable them from the hardware router.

[usconservative]

I saw that article. Have to say, I don't think the author got it exactly right on what still "talks to Microsoft" vs. what doesn't even with the services I identified above turned off.

For example: ... even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.

In the above example, disabling Cortana and location awareness isn't going to stop the basic Search function from Microsoft looking on your local hdd and out to Bing. That's built into Search.

What does happen is your location and other potentially "sensitive" information that people don't want to share will not be sent to Bing across the web. The appcache file that is created as a result of the search is useless. A randomly generated machine ID is all the file contains. The user still is not disclosing their location, which is the intent of disabling location awareness.

Sometimes these articles written by these so-called "experts" really aren't useful. I personally don't trust arstechnica as a source of technically correct information. Here's one example why from the same article:

Some of the traffic looks harmless but feels like it shouldn't be happening. For example, even with no Live tiles pinned to Start (and hence no obvious need to poll for new tile data), Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from MSN's network from time to time, using unencrypted HTTP to do so. While again the requests contain no identifying information, it's not clear why they're occurring at all, given that they have no corresponding tile.

So on the one hand, the author says the traffic "looks harmless" (and it is) and then goes on to point out other (harmless) behavior while claiming the behavior shouldn't be happening at all.

Sensationalistic. Scare people first with sensational titles, then have the article be completely useless because most folks never move beyond the sensationalistic title.

Arstechnica? Meh.......

[CedarDave]

This article appears to be a detailed guide on how to turn off the spy functions in Windows 10 and is good to save for later if or when you decide to update to it. However, it cannot be posted on FR due to copyright restrictions so I’m only providing a link:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10-doesnt-offer-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/

[Still Thinking]

Couldn’t you just do some work on HOSTS so all the spyware reports are just wrong numbers?