Privacy And Windows 10

[yogi]

Personal privacy is precious to most of us. Our natural instinct is to protect our privacy from prying eyes. It's a thing of personal value, after all. Unfortunately or not, today's world of computers and Big Data has done away with our ability to protect that which we considered to be private in the past. The good news is that there is still value to our privacy, and we can use that to our advantage.

Alan Henry writes for Lifehacker and has written about how we can use the intrinsic value of our private information to our advantage. Basically he sees trading off private information as the price one pays for a service. For example, Microsoft is offering Windows as a service these days, and it's free to anyone who can upgrade into it. But, is it really free? The correct answer is, no. We are paying for that service by sending Microsoft and all it's partners private information about us.

In spite of manic warnings from privacy advocates, we do have a choice in most cases. This is particularly true in Windows 10. A great example here is the need to log in to your Microsoft account in order to get access to your Windows 10 computer. Doing that automatically sends tons of information back to Microsoft. But it is also possible to log into your computer via a local account, just like the old days before Windows 8/10. When you choose to use the local login instead of your Microsoft data collecting account, you lose the security of two factor authentication and cannot use the Cortana app for searching. This is an obvious example of the trade off of privacy for service, but there are others. The linked article does a great job of explaining how our personal privacy is now a commodity over which we have more control than most people think.

PRIVACY AS A COMMODITY: http://lifehacker.com/im-a-privacy-advo ... 1723611163

If you are already into Windows 10 and thoroughly confused by or unaware of the privacy settings therein, you will find these two articles very helpful:

HOW TO: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-configure- ... 1716204024
WHAT IT MEANS: http://lifehacker.com/what-windows-10s- ... 1722267229

[Kellemora]

Thanks Yogi!

[Icey]

Ditto. I've passed the link on to a few people I know.

[yogi]

More information on how to manage security in Windows 10. This article is from Wired magazine:

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/windows-10 ... need-know/

[Kellemora]

Thank you Yogi, I'm heeding all of this information and making the changes suggested by many.

I'm still studying why it is running so slow.
All of my computers can now see and write to a shared folder on the Win10 machine.
But the Win10 machine still cannot see any other computer, yet.

Have not had much time to work with it lately.

Have a great evening!