How to Disable Windows 11 Spying: Complete Privacy Guide

Windows 11 Is Watching You. Here’s How to Make It Stop.

Your PC is yours. You paid for it, you set it up, and you use it every day — yet Windows 11 is quietly sending Microsoft a steady stream of data about everything you do. Diagnostic telemetry, activity history, advertising IDs, location pings, clipboard contents. Microsoft calls it “improving your experience.” Let’s call it what it is.

The good news: most of it can be shut off. Not all of it — Microsoft hardcoded some telemetry that even pro users can’t fully kill without a third-party tool — but you can reduce the signal dramatically. Here’s how to actually do it, step by step, without any fluff.

Start With the Privacy Settings Dashboard

Open Settings → Privacy & Security. This is your command center. Go through every subsection. Seriously — every one. The defaults are embarrassingly permissive.

• General: Turn off the advertising ID, tailored experiences, and “let apps show me personalized ads.” All off.
• Diagnostics & Feedback: Set to Required diagnostic data only. Disable “Improve inking and typing,” “Tailored experiences,” and turn the feedback frequency to “Never.”
• Activity History: Uncheck “Store my activity history on this device.” If you use a Microsoft account, also clear the history and disable syncing.
• Search Permissions: Turn off SafeSearch if you don’t need it, and disable “Show search highlights.” More importantly, turn off Cloud Content Search for both Microsoft account and work/school account.
• Location: Unless you genuinely need it, disable location services entirely. If you must keep it on, click “Choose which apps can access your location” and kill it for everything except Maps.

Don’t skip the app permissions further down: Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Account Info, Contacts, Calendar. Go through each one and revoke access for anything that doesn’t have a clear reason to need it. Your weather app doesn’t need your contacts list.

Kill Cortana and Search Telemetry

Cortana is mostly defanged in Windows 11, but the Search integration still phones home. Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Search Permissions and disable everything under “Cloud Content Search.” Then open the Taskbar settings and turn off Search highlights.

If you want to go further, you can disable the Cortana app entirely. Open PowerShell as Administrator and run:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers Microsoft.549981C3F5F10 | Remove-AppxPackage

Done. It’s gone. You won’t miss it.

Tackle Telemetry at the Service Level

Settings only go so far. Windows 11 has background services that run regardless of what you toggle in the UI. Press Win + R, type services.msc, and hunt down these three:

• Connected User Experiences and Telemetry — This is the main telemetry service. Set it to Disabled and stop it.
• DiagTrack — Same service, different display name. Make sure it’s stopped.
• WAP Push Message Routing Service — Handles device management over cellular. Disable it unless you’re on a managed corporate device.

You can also block telemetry endpoints at the network level by adding Microsoft’s known telemetry hosts to your hosts file at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Tools like O&O ShutUp10++ (free) maintain updated lists of these and let you apply them with a single click. More on that below.

Use O&O ShutUp10++ — Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

If manually hunting through services and registry keys sounds tedious, ShutUp10++ is the tool for the job. It’s free, portable (no install needed), and gives you a clean interface showing every privacy-relevant Windows setting with a green/red toggle. It also flags which settings are safe to change and which might break functionality.

Run it, click Actions → Apply only recommended settings as a starting point, review what it’s about to change, and apply. You can export your configuration as a backup. It even creates a system restore point before making changes, which is more than most people would remember to do manually.

ShutUp10++ covers things the Settings panel doesn’t touch: disabling Windows Error Reporting, turning off SmartScreen telemetry, blocking app launch tracking, and more. It’s maintained actively and works well on Windows 11.

Ditch the Microsoft Account (If You Can)

This one matters more than people realize. Using a Microsoft account ties your activity, settings, clipboard history, and browsing to a cloud profile. If you don’t need cross-device sync, a local account is strictly better for privacy.

During a fresh Windows 11 setup, Microsoft now hides the local account option — you need to disconnect from the internet at the network screen, or type a fake email like [email protected] and click through the “something went wrong” error. Annoying, but it works.

If you’re already set up with a Microsoft account, go to Settings → Accounts → Your Info and look for “Sign in with a local account instead.” Follow the wizard. Your files stay put.

Browser and Edge Privacy

Microsoft Edge is installed by default and set as the default browser. It’s not terrible, but it ships with tracking protection set to “Balanced” and has its own telemetry. Either switch to Firefox or Brave, or if you prefer to stay on Edge, go to edge://settings/privacy and set tracking prevention to Strict, disable “Help improve Microsoft products,” turn off “Personalize your web experience,” and uncheck all the shopping and productivity suggestions.

Also disable Bing suggestions in the address bar and turn off the “new tab page” feed — it’s a data collection surface dressed up as a news feed.

One More Thing: Windows Update Delivery Optimization

By default, Windows 11 uses your PC to distribute updates to other users on the internet. This isn’t a privacy disaster, but it’s your bandwidth and your hardware being used for Microsoft’s infrastructure. Go to Settings → Windows Update → Advanced Options → Delivery Optimization and either turn it off completely or restrict it to “Devices on my local network.”

Windows 11’s privacy situation isn’t unsolvable. It just requires you to be deliberate — because Microsoft certainly isn’t going to do it for you. Spend an hour going through these steps once, and you’ll have meaningfully reduced what your own computer reports back about you. That hour is worth it.