With a lot of data leaks and revelations happening, everyone is concerned about their privacy. And whatever device you use, having proper settings to ensure maximum privacy is a must. This post talks about freeware for Windows that lets you adjust your Windows 10 Privacy Settings such that you have maximum privacy on your computer. The tool is a freeware and is called W10Privacy. It has been best tuned to work with Windows 10.
W10Privacy for Windows 10
The main motive behind this tool is to bring all privacy-related settings on Windows 10 at one place. And the tool does its job at best. It brings you all the settings well categorized into different tabs and tells you their severity. All the recommended settings with no side effects are highlighted in green, conditionally recommended settings are marked in yellow, and all the restricted recommended setting are marked in dark orange. By restricted recommended here, we mean that the setting can have a negative effect on your computer.
If you start the tool, you will be welcomed with a long list of settings and a lot of categories. All the settings in the list are there to improve the privacy scenario on your system in some or the other way.
Turn off Windows 10 Privacy Settings
There are general privacy settings available, for example, Deny Microsoft to use diagnostics data. Then the tool gives you privacy control over Apps, Telemetry and Search. You can easily find settings such as Do not let Microsoft collect and use the information to give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts and more.
W10Privacy not only gives you privacy settings regarding Windows but also for other Microsoft apps. The applications include Explorer, Edge, Internet Explorer, and OneDrive. You can find plenty of these settings and find out whether it is recommended to have this setting or not.
Moving on, there are a few more settings that we have not yet discussed here. The categories include:
- Network
- Services
- Tasks
- Tweaks
- Firewall
- Background Apps
- User-Apps and
- System Apps.
Interestingly, under User Apps and System Apps you get an option to uninstall all applications which are not generally required and are known to collect personal data.
Since you are changing a lot of settings around, having a system restore point is must just in case something goes wrong. W10Privacy comes with a built-in option to create a system restore point before you start changing any settings on your computer. You will need to start the program with admin privileges to use the restore point feature.
Another interesting feature here is the ability to save and load configuration files. Once you’ve selected all the settings that you want, you can save it as a separate configuration file. You can use this configuration file later on another computer or your computer. The file can be easily sent to someone over email or other mediums. This feature allows you to preserve your settings so that you don’t have to manually configure the tool every time.
W10Privacy is a great privacy tool for Windows. The amount of settings it lets you configure is commendable. You won’t find such number of settings anywhere else. Apart from that, the tool is simple, portable and easy to use. Also, the added benefits of a restore point and a modular configuration file makes this tool a complete solution. Click here to download W10Privacy.
TIP: More free tools here to fix Windows 10 Privacy issues.
