Microsoft announced today that it is creating a new web-based privacy dashboard and changing Windows 10 Setup to be more transparent about its privacy settings.
“Trust is a core pillar of our More Personal Computing vision, and we are working hard to make sure Windows 10 is the most secure Windows ever and a product you love and trust,” Microsoft’s Terry Myerson wrote in a blog post today. “Based on your feedback, we are launching two new experiences to help ensure you are in control of your privacy.”
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First, Microsoft is creating a web-based privacy dashboard on the Microsoft Account website (the configuration of which I just wrote about, go figure) called Your Privacy.
“You can see and control your activity data from Microsoft including location, search, browsing, and Cortana Notebook data across multiple Microsoft services,” Mr. Myerson explains. “his is our first step in expanding the tools that give you visibility and control over your data spanning Microsoft products and services, and we will continue to add more functionality and categories of data over time.”
So that is useful. But I am far more interested to see what they’re doing in Windows 10, where Microsoft is completely replacing Express Settings in Setup.
“We’re introducing in Windows 10 a new privacy set up experience, simplifying Diagnostic data levels and further reducing the data collected at the Basic level,” Myerson writes. “If you are moving from Windows 7 or Windows 8, or doing a fresh install of Windows 10, the new set up experience will clearly show you simple but important settings and you will need to choose your settings before you can move forward with setup. If you are already using Windows 10, we will use notifications to prompt you to choose your privacy settings. We’ll introduce this process in an upcoming Windows Insider build soon.”
Microsoft is also reducing the amount of data collected for diagnostics, which should please the privacy police.