Windows 10 and 11 Privacy Settings: Stop the Data Collection in 5 Minutes

Windows ships with a handful of switches turned on that most people would turn off if anyone had shown them where they were - so here is where they are, in the order worth doing them.

None of this needs a tool, an account or a command line, and none of it breaks anything you use.

The paths below are the Windows 11 ones; on Windows 10 the root is Settings > Privacy, without the "& security" part, and the rest of each path matches.

Set aside five minutes and work down the list.

The Five Switches That Actually Matter

• Turn off the advertising ID. Settings > Privacy & security > General, and switch off the option that lets apps show you personalised ads using your advertising ID.
• Cut diagnostic data back to required. Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback, switch off optional diagnostic data, switch off tailored experiences, then press Delete diagnostic data to clear what has already gone.
• Stop activity history. Settings > Privacy & security > Activity history, and switch off storing your activity history on this device.
• Prune app permissions. Settings > Privacy & security > App permissions, then go through camera, microphone and location and switch off anything that has no business asking - a photo viewer does not need your microphone.
• Kill the suggestions. Settings > Personalisation > Start switches off app promotions in the Start menu, and Settings > Privacy & security > General switches off suggested content inside the Settings app itself.

That is the five minutes. Everything below is optional, and one of it is a warning.

Recall, and Whether It Is Even on Your PC

Recall takes periodic screenshots of what you are doing so you can search back through them later, and it is the feature people are most worried about.

It is also the one most often described wrongly. Saving snapshots is off until you switch it on, and it only exists on a Copilot+ PC - a machine with a fast neural processor, 16 GB of memory, device encryption switched on and Windows Hello set up with a fingerprint or face.

If your PC has it, the switch is at Settings > Privacy & security > Recall & snapshots. If you want it gone rather than off, search the Start menu for Turn Windows features on or off, untick Recall and restart - that deletes any snapshots already saved.

Do the Whole Lot at Once Instead

Clicking through twenty screens is fine once. Doing it again on a second PC, or after a feature update puts some of it back, gets old fast.

Win11Debloat flips these settings in bulk on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. It strips out the telemetry along with the scheduled tasks that quietly restart it, clears the suggested content out of the Start menu, and hides whichever options do not apply to your version.

Two things make it safe to try: it takes a restore point before it touches anything, and it has a preview mode that shows you every change it would make before you commit to any of it.

If it is the preinstalled clutter bothering you rather than the data collection, that is a different job - our guide to stripping the AI apps and preinstalled software out of Windows 11 covers it.

Swap the Apps That Phone Home

Changing switches only goes so far when the apps themselves are the collection point. Three swaps do most of the work:

• Mozilla Firefox or Brave in place of Edge, both of which block trackers by default rather than as an extra.
• VLC in place of the built-in Films & TV app, which plays more formats and reports nothing back.
• LibreOffice in place of Microsoft 365 where the work is offline anyway - it is free, and nothing it opens goes near a cloud.

The Microsoft Account Question

A local account is the biggest single privacy change available, and it is also the one with a real cost attached.

Microsoft has spent the last two years closing the tricks that let you skip the account during setup, so the route that still works is to finish setup normally and convert afterwards, at Settings > Accounts > Your info.

If you would rather keep the account and just stop it filling your cloud storage, Windows 11 now lets you say no to the OneDrive backup prompt outright, instead of only being able to postpone it.

Two Bits of Old Advice to Ignore

Both of these are all over the internet, and both of them were true once.

Setting your Wi-Fi as metered does not stop Windows Update. Microsoft's own documentation says priority updates download over a metered connection anyway, so it does not do the job people use it for - and to the extent it slows anything down, you have traded a security hole for a privacy problem that two clicks would have fixed.

Use Settings > Windows Update > Pause updates if you genuinely need a few weeks of quiet, then come back through this list afterwards, because a feature update can put some of these switches back.

There is no Cortana left to disable. The Cortana app reached end of support in late 2023 and is not on current Windows. The setting people mean is Settings > Privacy & security > Speech, where switching off online speech recognition stops your voice going to Microsoft for processing.

What to Keep Switched On

Privacy advice goes wrong when it turns into switching everything off. Two things earn their place.

Leave automatic security updates alone. An unpatched machine leaks far more than an advertising ID ever will, and this is the trade the metered-connection tip above gets backwards.

Leave Windows Security running unless you have deliberately installed something else, and if you want to add to it rather than replace it, the security tools here are the on-demand kind that sit alongside it rather than fighting it.

Still on Windows 10?

Do the list above, then deal with the bigger problem: Windows 10 stopped getting security updates on 14 October 2025.

Free consumer security updates run to 12 October 2027 if you enrol, and there are three ways in: switch on Windows Backup settings sync, spend 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or pay 30 US dollars once. One enrolment covers up to 10 devices.

Tightening the privacy settings on a machine that has stopped getting patches is polishing the door handle while the window is open.

Quick questions

Five minutes of switches, and the ones worth leaving alone.

If you would rather not click through all of it, Win11Debloat does the same job in one pass with a preview first - or tell us which setting caught you out, because the ones that quietly switch themselves back on are worth knowing about.

For the background on why any of these switches exist, we went through why Microsoft gives Windows away and where the money actually comes from.