We already knew that Windows is a threat to privacy for a long time, but now it has been essentially confirmed by a competent authority.

The German Federal Cyberintelligence Agency BSI (also known as the German FBI) published a report on telemetry in Windows 10 and found that Microsoft tracks you in 534 different ways in Windows 10, and that setting the Telemetry level to Full only reduces the tracking processes to 503. However, in Windows 10 Enterprise, the number is reduced to 13.

Excerpt from PrivateInternetAccess:

Some interesting facts from the document:

  • Windows pushes your data to Microsoft servers every 30 minutes.
  • The size of the logging equates 12KB to 16KB per hour on an idle computer. (Which, for context, is roughly a copy Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” every day, in data.)
  • It sends information to seven different locations. Including Ireland, Wyoming, and the small town of Boston, Virginia

The next logical step is to find out what is inside of those 300KB per day of data.

The report can be found here.

Do not want to be tracked? Use one of the many Linux distributions available. For beginners, I recommend Ubuntu.