Privacy News Windows 10: Activity may be recorded even if you disable it

LASER_oneXM

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Feb 4, 2016
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The Privacy dashboard on Microsoft's website lists recent activity, e.g. visited sites or started applications, even if Activity History is disabled on a Windows 10 device.
Recent versions of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system support a feature called Activity History that is keeping track of some of the things that users are doing on the device so that they may "jump back".
... ...
Three main options are exposed to users and administrators in the Settings application:
  • Store my activity history on this device.
  • Send my activity history to Microsoft.
  • Show activities for specific accounts.
The first keeps track of activity on the device, the second sends it to Microsoft.
Even if you disable all three options in Settings, activity may be listed on Microsoft's Privacy Dashboard website on the company's account.microsoft.com site.
A user on Reddit noticed this and published a question on the site about the issue. Sign in was done with a local account and a Microsoft Account was used only for the Store.

Even with all Activity History toggles disabled, Activity History was displayed on the Privacy Dashboard for the Microsoft account.
Closing Words
The leaking of Activity History data even when the feature is disabled is likely an, admittedly, serious bug.
 
L

Local Host

This is false, as I always had the feature disabled (never used, nor liked) and my account history is empty. :coffee:

Then again it could affect specific countries like USA, where people don't have laws to protect their online privacy.
 

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