In a move that will certainly please privacy-conscious users, it seems that Microsoft is about to introduce the ability to view and delete the telemetry data that Windows 10 collects, according to new options that have popped up in the operating system’s latest preview builds.
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Last April, after taking what seemed like endless heat on the issue, Microsoft clarified what personal data Windows 10 collects on a basic level (the minimum amount of telemetry data you can elect to send).
But as Ghacks spotted, the most recent preview builds of Windows 10 (released this month and last month) have a pair of new options at the bottom of the Diagnostics & Feedback screen: ‘Diagnostic data viewer’ and ‘Delete diagnostic data’.
At the moment, these are merely placeholders which don’t function or do anything when clicked, but hopefully they will be live for those testing Windows 10 soon enough.
As a result, it’s not clear exactly what their function is at this point, but it seems obvious enough: the former should allow the user to fully view all the diagnostic data being collected on their system, and the latter should facilitate its deletion.It's important to note that Microsoft haven't announced anything about this themselves, yet, and nobody's seen this feature in action, either, so there's a lot of assumptions in this report. In particular, there's no indication yet whether this functionality would be available to all Windows 10 users, or whether Microsoft might end up restricting it to high-priced SKUs of the OS, as they've previously done with tools like the Group Policy Editor, or the ability to turn off the "Microsoft Consumer Experience."
Still, assuming that Windows 10 Home users get access to these tools, too, it could be a long-overdue addition to the privacy and personal information management tools that the OS should always have included. Honestly, giving users a greater degree of control over Windows 10's telemetry bullshit is the kind of thing that might have convinced me to switch, had they done it back when switching was still a free upgrade.
Now, of course, upgrading will cost extra, which means that I still won't be switching until the time comes to buy a new PC... which won't happen for me until AMD releases new, Spectre-free CPU designs, which is about the only "feature" that I'd really consider switching PCs to obtain (and, no, I'm not even considering switching to Intel). In the meantime, regardless of which version of Windows you're running, you should still be running an anti-telemetry application like SpyBot's Anti-Beacon as well. Don't forget, Microsoft's telemetry bullshit isn't restricted to Windows 10 anymore.