Windows 10 offers an option to help protect third parties from tracking your movements based on your connections to Wi-Fi networks. Under Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi, turn on the Use random hardware addresses setting. This will keep third parties from matching your Wi-Fi adapter’s hardware address with your personal information, and therefore much more difficult to track your location.
The internet is full of third party ad networks and analytics companies that use cookies and tracking technology to record web movements. This information is usually used to correlate online actions and movements to the things you do away from the internet. Sometimes this can be as harmless as the ads on the bottom of a webpage being that of the product you just googled, or the implications can be be used to discover your offline identity. Regardless, one should be cautious of where all these internet movements lead. Third-party anti-tracking software such as Abine’s Blur will limit the amount of information that such ads can gather. Ad-blocking software can limit such information as well in addition to its purpose of blocking unnecessary ads. Although many advise against leaning on ad-blocking alone, due to the usual close ties between some ad-blocking third-parties and the ads they block. Employ an ad-in to limit your digital footprint however is better than running free range around the internet. Even if it is just a chrome plug in.
Windows 10 Operating System houses information that can be easily used to discover your location. Within Settings > Privacy > Location you will find access to preferences concerning location information. You can use the master toggle at the top of the screen to turn off all location features for all users of the machine. I personally would clear the location history that is saved within this window, if nothing else.
Windows 10 will log a small amount of your information to provide Cortana with a solid knowledge of your preferences so that she may generate suggestions. If you rather take care of yourself without Cortana studying you, you can easily turn her off completely. or navigate her settings.
Under Settings > Privacy > General, click Info about how I write and turn it off so that your typos aren’t used to improve things like the built-in spell checker.
Under Settings > Privacy > Speech, inking, & typing, under the Getting to know you heading, click Stop getting to know me to turn off personalization.
Lastly, Settings > Privacy > General. Advertising ID controls whether Microsoft serves personalized ads to ad-supported apps. If you turn this option off, you still get ads, but they’re not personalized. In any case, your information is not shared with advertisers.
A few tricks to give you more of your privacy back.
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