De-Enshittify Windows 11: Make Windows 11 Respect Your Privacy ⭐

Note: This is an early peek at a chapter from my next book, De-Enshittify Windows 11. This book will be available for purchase soon, hopefully by the end of February. --Paul

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Thanks to its forced telemetry and in-box tracking and advertising, Windows 11 is anything but private. Microsoft does provide you with some surface-level control over Windows 11 privacy settings, but you need to do a lot of spelunking in the Settings app to find options that are purposefully scattered throughout. And you can't completely rein in the bad behaviors without digging even deeper and using a third-party app to fully disable the terribleness.
? The problem with privacy in Windows 11
The problem with privacy in Windows 11 is easily stated: There isn't any. Microsoft violates your privacy by default and does everything it can, from using dark patterns to outright harassment, to convince you to lower your defenses and allow it to gain more access to your personal information. It does this so that it can track you online, build a profile, sell that information to advertisers, and use it against you in advertisements of its own.

This behavior didn't happen suddenly. It started subtly, as is so often the case when one of the world's biggest companies decides it's going to start violating the privacy of its own customers: Beginning with Windows 8 in 2012, Microsoft began assigning a unique advertising ID to each PC, just as it does with its Bing search engine, so that it can collect usage data and sell it to third-party advertisers so they could provide users with more personalized search results. This advertising ID was anonymous and still is, and it can still be disabled today, though you have to know it's happening and where to look.

Microsoft's privacy violations escalated dramatically with Windows 10 in 2015. Microsoft made data collection mandatory in this release, in part to help with product quality: The idea was that Microsoft could keep Windows "secure, up-to-date, and running properly" because it was collecting all this data. But there were three levels of data collection—Full, Enhanced, and Basic—and even Basic was an overreach.

Perhaps sensing the obvious backlash, Microsoft used dark patterns to obfuscate its activities. During Windows Setup, for example, there was a "Get going fast" screen that described some of the data that Windows 10 would collect if you just agreed to let it do so. And while there was a prominent and pre-select "Use Express Settings" button, the opt-out choice, a "Customize settings" text link, was both tiny and difficult to read.

Because of this, antitrust regulators began asking questions. And so Microsoft in early 2017 revealed that it would proactively make three major changes to its data collecting behaviors.

It would switch from three levels of data collection to two and reduce the amount of data collected when the user chose the Basic data collection level.
It agreed to change Windows Setup and...