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It's a valiant effort, but you're navigating a privacy minefield. Even if you find/disable all the known things, a single windows update can introduce a new opt-out "feature" that undoes it all. Your effort might be better spent migrating to a less invasive system.

"Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always."



Well, I guess it's inevitable as long as I'm using a proprietary operating system. I don't expect Apple to be any better. Heck, even Ubuntu nowadays comes with ads that you need to opt out of.

At least if I get Windows 10 Pro, I'll be able to turn off non-security-related updates.


> Heck, even Ubuntu nowadays comes with ads that you need to opt out of.

No longer true. Canonical took a lot of (deserved) flak for making that feature opt-out, and last year they finally fixed it [1].

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/03/ubuntu-make-amazon-produc...


Are you sure? IIRC the last LTS version I tried (14.04) still has Amazon search on by default.


Actually, no. That article was dated Mar 31, 2014, so I assumed that they switched the configuration option by 14.10.

.... but some searching indicates that they won't get around to disabling online searches by default until Unity 8 is default in Ubuntu. It seems that Unity 8 won't be default until 16.04 [1] or later [2]. So I rescind my previous statement. Canonical deserves as much scorn as you can dish out for disregarding their users' privacy for 3 years and counting.

[1] http://mhall119.com/2014/10/unity-8-desktop/ [2] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-16-04-LTS-Won-t-Have-U...




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