As I continue to dig further into preview builds of Windows 10, ahead of the Summer Anniversary Update, there’s a lot to like from this stable and sensible operating system. Indeed, the integrated “Edge” browser has received plugin support and most notable extension is Adblock Plus. Yet the bandwidth savings and privacy ABD offers is somewhat incongruous to Microsoft’s native and ever-present telemetry. It looks like WiFi Sense is done. But, upon first boot of the latest Insider Build, messaging (skypehost.exe), calendar (hxcalendarappimm.exe), and cloud storage (onedrive.exe) apps all reached out to Microsoft without having been summoned, by me, the operator.
5 thoughts on “Microsoft Edge Gets Adblock Plus but Windows 10 telemetry still runs rampant”
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Getting a handle on calls back to the mothership via GlassWire.
I agree way too much stuff calling back to their mother ship. Even Firefox has gotten bad.. In any event I am using a local account with win 10 on one PC and my Microsoft account on another. Using a local account seem to cut down some of mother ship connecting.
The insider builds are pre-release and intended for testing purposes, so they have telemetry set to “full”, which sends /everything/ you do including the content of your messaging and browsing. I have no particular problem with that– it’s reasonable to force telemetry on people supposed to be testing your product.
My complaint is with the _release_ versions of Windows 10 Home and Pro, which do not allow the user to drop telemetry below “basic”, which still sends quite a lot of metadata to the mothership. The only way to entirely disable telemetry is to get a program like O&O’s Shutup10 (which I strongly recommend).
Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t respect the user’s preferences, so they reset the Shutup10 settings in updates! This happened with the 1511 update. Enraged me.
If I didn’t play videogames, I would have switched to OSX over this. As is, I just sit and stew.
“Getting a handle on calls back to the mothership via GlassWire.”
Looking at their website, I can’t tell if GlassWire is Little Snitch Pro, or Little Snitch Lite.
As far as I can tell, there’s no equivalent. But this gets me part of the way there. In the Digital Media Bytes post the other day, Rodalpho broke down some of its strengths and weaknesses.
Speaking of which, good points above Rodalpho regarding Insider Build expectations. Also, thanks for the tip on user accounts, atmusky. I’m not sure why I link my online Microsoft account when I probably don’t need to.