Can you completely disable Windows 10 sending data home?

Question

Is there any way to COMPLETELY prevent Windows 10 from sending any data to Microsoft? According to what I've read, while it's possible to mitigate it changing Group Policy, registry values, etc. there is no way to completely eliminate the possibility. Is this true?

Solution 1

Yes, you have to manually disable Telemetry.

From WinAero:

1) Open Registry Editor. (regedit)
2) Go to the following Registry key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection
3) There you need to create a new a 32-bit DWORD value named AllowTelemetry and set it to 0.
4) Now, you need to disable a couple of Windows services. Right click the File Explorer item in Windows 10 Start menu and pick Manage from its context menu. Go to Services and Applications -> Services in the left pane. In the services list, disable the following services

   Diagnostics Tracking Service
   dmwappushsvc

   Update: Windows 10 version 1511 changed the Diagnostics Tracking Service to     

   Connected User Experiences and Telemetry
   dmwappushsvc


5) Double click the mentioned services and pick "Disabled" for the startup type

Alternatively, you can download Windows 10 Ultimate tweaker, from Thewindowsclub and in "Security and privacy settings" disable all from Microsoft.

EDIT: if you believe that these services do not really disabling, you can always delete them. Although I'm not sure that the system does not become unstable.

Solution 2

Since the answers so far are not complete and somehow misleading:

First, you definitely cannot stop Windows 10 from transferring data to Microsoft with normal methods the O/S provides (including registry hacks). Even if you set the telemetry level to 0, Windows will still transfer some data (see below).

The only method to do what you ask for is blocking the network traffic (using your router's or Windows's firewall, or (ab)using %WinDir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts). But note that you probably will never know about all domains or IP addresses which host the respective Microsoft services, so creating appropriate firewall rules is not possible in practice.

You could fire up Wireshark and let it run for a few months and see which IP addresses / domains your machine communicates with, though, and block those which you believe belong to Microsoft, or take the opposite approach and block all traffic in your firewall and whitelist each domain / IP address you need. Both methods are extremely painful and not viable IMHO. Of course, this applies only if the PC in question needs internet access.

If the PC in question only needs local network access, you could just block that PC from accessing anything outside the local LAN by a few simple firewall rules on your router.

And, of course, you can deactivate your network adapter or unplug the Ethernet cable, the latter being the only method which is absolutely reliable (provided there is no WiFi adapter in that PC).

Secondly, although you didn't ask for it, preventing all access to Microsoft is a very, very bad idea. The main reason is that you definitely should install the Windows security updates. To determine which updates you need, and to get them, your PC will have to communicate with Microsoft services; this is even true if you use delivery optimization. The only way around this is to set up a WSUS server; but then, this server will have to communicate with Microsoft to download these updates.

Third, @Northumber's answer is somehow misleading. I didn't read the link he gave, but as a matter of fact, a telemetry level of 0 is only effective with Windows 10 Enterprise and its relatives, but not with Windows 10 Pro or "lower" versions. The registry hack the answer mentions is possible on all versions of Windows 10, but all non-Enterprise versions will treat a level of 0 as if a level of 1 had been set.

Disabling respective services will reduce the amount of data which is sent to Microsoft, possibly drastically, but there is no way to cut it off completely. Note that such data collection or exchange might happen not only by services. For example, I have seen a quite impressive amount of dubious tasks in the task scheduler which are doing their thing at unexpected moments; this is only one place of several dozens (probably) where data collection or transfer can be triggered.

In summary, removing all possible sources which could trigger data exchange is impossible IMHO. Personally, I have decided to use only Windows 10 Enterprise (even in my home network) just for the fact that setting the telemetry level to 0 is effective there, and Microsoft promises (in the help texts) that this will lead to only security relevant data (which updates are missing?) being exchanged. Personally, I can live with that because security updates are absolutely necessary, even for a PC which has no internet access.

Ironically, Windows Enterprise versions are not available officially to private users or SOHOs, at least in my country; obiously, Microsoft tries to doom such clients to extensive data collection. Fortunately, eBay comes to rescue ...

Comments

[DavidPostill]

How to disable all Windows 10 spying features?

[magicandre1981]

update to Win10 Enterprise and here the GPOs apply to stop all telemetry.

[Stijn de Witt]

As Windows seems to keep re-enabling these services (see answer) I actually still think this is a great question. Great that there is another / duplicate question, but this one apparently ranks higher in Google (because I found this one and not the other one).