What is Telemetry in Windows 11/10
Telemetry is an automated process, where data is collected at remote points and transmitted back to the ‘parent’, who uses it for the purpose or measuring, monitoring and improving services. Says Microsoft: In Windows 11/10, and now Windows 8 and Windows 7 too, Microsoft collects data from computers, aggregates it, and uses it to keep Windows devices secure and improve the quality of Microsoft services and the Windows operating system. The data that is collected by Microsoft complies with its security and privacy policies, as well as international laws and regulations. It is used by Microsoft to provide, improve, and personalize experiences, and for security, health, quality, and performance analysis. It may, however, share aggregated, anonymous telemetry data with third parties for limited purposes or share business reports with partners.
Configure & disable Windows 11/10 Telemetry settings
While the intentions of collecting telemetry data might be good, many enterprises and organizations may have Windows Privacy issues and may feel that their privacy is being breached – and they might want to block the collection & uploading of this telemetry data. If you are looking for ways to minimize your connections from your Windows systems to Microsoft, you can configure the Telemetry and Data Collection settings in Windows 10. As this post mainly targets IT Pro’s as it discusses ways organizations can configure telemetry at the lowest level – and evaluate & turn off in their business environment, the connections Windows makes to Microsoft services, individual home users of Windows 11/10 may not find the contents of this post much useful. They can, therefore, take a look at the following posts too:
Change Windows Privacy SettingsTools to tweak Windows Privacy settings
To manage all the configurations and network settings, you will have to have Windows 11/10 Enterprise or Windows 11/10 Education or later installed. These OS versions allow you to configure and disable Telemetry at the Security level, turn off Windows Defender Telemetry, MSRT reporting along with the ability to turn off all other connections to Microsoft services and prevent Windows from sending any data to Microsoft.
Levels of Telemetry in Windows
There are 4 levels of telemetry in Windows 11/10.
Change level of Windows Telemetry
If you wish to change the level of telemetry on your system, open Group Policy Editor and navigate to the following setting: Here select Enabled and then from the drop-down, select Basic or any level which your version of OS allows.
Disable Telemetry in Windows 11/10
If you are an individual Home user and your version of Windows 11/10 does not ship with Group Policy Editor, Run regedit to open the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:
Here, create a new DWORD (32-Bit), name it AllowTelemetry and give it a value of 0. This will disable telemetry. If the key does not exist, you will have to create it. Now you need to also disable the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service. Run services.msc and look for this service. Double-click on it and from the Startup type, select Disabled.
Alternatively, to disable this Service you could use Windows PowerShell and run the following commands one after the other: Read: How to Disable Telemetry & Data Collection using Task Scheduler.
Configure Telemetry settings for individual components
If you wish to set the telemetry levels for some of Windows 11/10 functions individually, you can do that too. Windows 11/10 allows you to configure telemetry settings for its following components and thereby control the data that is sent to Microsoft: You will be able to turn off telemetry for individual components using various ways. It could be via the UI, Group Policy, Registry, MDM policy or Windows ICD. This table shows which paths are available for configuring the settings.
This excellent post on TechNet will show you how to do it individually for each component. Also, see how to disable Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program using GPEDIT or Registry and how to disable NVIDIA Telemetry.
