Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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This is…not the best idea, imo. If I had to guess, I would say that it is attempting to disable diagnostic data by setting a registry key — only on Windows Home or Pro, that’s ineffective and doesn’t have any extra benefit compared to just disabling optional telemetry in the settings app. It also seems to pointlessly duplicate things the user already has control of (why does there need to be a toggle for Hyper V and Windows Subsystem Linux?) Last I checked they were pretty simple enough to turn on and off in the base system. Same goes for stuff such as Location Tracking and Activity History, which I’m fairly sure are literally already in the privacy settings.
Attempting to do large scale “debloating” will inevitably lead to system breakage and things not working. Start Menu shortcuts? They’re one click away from being uninstalled. OEM Bloat such as random third party antiviruses? You should be doing a clean install to get rid of those. Apps such as Cortana?
winget uninstall. You also don’t need a third party program to manage your app updates, that’s literally whatwinget upgrade --allis for.That's not how it works, actually. Its more sophisticated. The point is to provide easy access to options for a user that doesn't want to root through the guts of a system
And no, it is more robust than that. This tool doesn't lead to breakage. IT admins use this tool.
And finally, your last suggestions are beyond the ability of the average user
While I can see what the author was going for, I still don't think it's worth it to give yet another third party app admin access in order to make managing settings slightly easier.
How does it work then?
A sysadmin would usually use group policies to manage settings and install apps automatically, especially since they would likely be using Windows Pro or Enterprise in a work environment.