I think I would think about specific Windows Telemetry that you want to disable and more importantly, why (i.e. "What's the Threat Model around Microsoft knowing this"). Because the vast majority of the telemetry collected by Windows is simply to make Windows work better - things like "Upgrade failed because $REASON" or "$DRIVER is causing performance problems".

You can see a lot of the kinds of telemetry that Windows is interested in if you go to Event Viewer => Application Logs => Microsoft => Windows, if you read it you see that it's like, Google Lighthouse style stuff, to make Windows faster and more reliable

Use these scripts to figure out the kinds of things you don't want to run, then make really targeted "Disable This" choices

Developers can also enable the Diagnostic Data Viewer and directly see all the telemetry events that Windows sends in the JSON forms that it sends them: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...

I don’t have a problem with the telemetry on windows. I’m unsure why everyone gets so upset. MS isn’t collecting stuff to shove advertising down our throat. It’s getting usage to figure out what’s wrong with windows and make it better. As you say.

I have issue with Facebook and Google blatantly collecting whatever they can to build profiles of us all to shove advertising down our throat that isn’t even relevant to us.

> MS isn’t collecting stuff to shove advertising down our throat

maybe if MS wanted people to believe that, they wouldn't put so much advertising in their OS

I’ve to this day never seen any advertising in windows. Must be something only in America. :/

Edit: (seen the articles about it but never actually seen it in Windows)

The thing is this script is not only about telemetry, but also about disabling some annoyances that are especially annoying in server or workstation environment.

I don't think there's an up to date resource describing all these tweaks. My recommendations:

- Use the original script, it's slightly more up to date, last update was in november 2020: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script - Read it's library of tweaks, especially the notes about potential unwanted side effects in comments. If you don't understand what each feature does, google it. The tweaks are grouped. - Don't enable any tweak where you don't understand what it does, especially in the security and network tweaks categories.

I use O&O ShutUp10 and it is much more approachable. Rather than immediately enabling and blocking settings, ShutUp10 gives you recommendations and you can reasearch individual settings you aren't sure of.