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Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

up1.ca

11–20 of 288 posts

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#13
post #11

And yet, you posed this on the internet, sharing your IP & MAC addresses with several companies.

Utilitarianism - OP may have decided that the small amount of damage he's garnered from an IP + MAC leak (both of which are somewhat easily obtainable) was worth informing thousands of people that Microsoft is acting this way.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#15
post #11

And yet, you posed this on the internet, sharing your IP & MAC addresses with several companies.

I'll take one for the team here, I think it's important that people know about this and a one-off disclosure of these details is no big deal for me. However, a repeated one, sent with a unique identifier, from any location I bring my machine is more concerning and I know there are people with even greater privacy concerns than myself who will want to know this.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#16

I wish this was happening on my machine so I could investigate, but it's not. Searches in Start ask if I want to search the web then open a browser. I have the default search settings.

Check for connections being made by SearchUI.exe over HTTPS to Bing servers. A tool like TcpView or Wireshark should do the job.

If you really don't have these being made, please share with us your settings, anything you suspect may have disabled these? I've been unable to find anything and I've applied the tweaks from this article, including the GPO changes:

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/07/30/windows-10-and-privacy/

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#17
post #12

Ubuntu does the same by default if you do not disable it via Privacy. Not suprised that MS does this, however the sad part is for a simple search, there are literally thosaunds of bytes exchanged

> there are literally thousaunds of bytes exchanged

For people on capped connections, this is a nightmare. 4kB/search, for using your computer normally! Even though 100 searches/day is only 12MB of data/month, the fact that Microsoft thinks it's okay for the OS to slurp data like this boggles my mind.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#18
post #12

Ubuntu does the same by default if you do not disable it via Privacy. Not suprised that MS does this, however the sad part is for a simple search, there are literally thosaunds of bytes exchanged

Didn't they disable this?

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#20

I wish this was happening on my machine so I could investigate, but it's not. Searches in Start ask if I want to search the web then open a browser. I have the default search settings.

Just FYI, Microsoft has one of the clearer Privacy Statements. It's organized by service and provides an overview and then the option to drill-in. You might get some answers in there:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp...

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