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There is a world of things you can do to make browsing safer. This means you won’t be able to speak to Cortana anymore - but it will also prevent Microsoft from using your voice input to improve its speech services. In your privacy settings, you can also head to “Speech, Inking and Typing” to switch off voice assistance. You can disable ad targeting, delete your browsing history, as well as your location history, voice activity and many more. In Microsoft’s defense, it is highly intuitive and will let you track and manage a lot of the information gathered about you. Unsurprisingly called Microsoft’s Privacy Dashboard, you can download it here. Read more: The iOS 13 privacy settings you should change right now Make privacy management a lot easierĭid all those tips sound like a lot of tab-opening, toggle switching, and confused navigating through various settings on your device? That’s because it is –but Microsoft has actually built a web tool to make all this important admin as smooth as possible. You can easily control camera access in the “Camera” menu of the “Privacy” section, and either completely turn it off, or manage access for individual apps. This will disable mapping apps and localised search, but you can set a default location for those apps to use as a stand-in if necessary.įinally, you’ll be happy to know that you can ditch that dusty black tape stuck over your webcam. You can, however, turn off location tracking entirely by clicking “Change” in the “Location” tab of your privacy settings. What’s more, if continuous GPS tracking makes you feel uncomfortable, it is worth knowing that Windows 10 stores your device location’s history for up to 24 hours after you have switched on location – and it allows apps with permission to access this information. This where you can stop apps from accessing information stored in your Microsoft account. The easiest way to make sure that individual apps access only the data you are willing to share is to manage those settings manually from the privacy tab in the “Account Information” section. You can, indeed, reset your advertising ID completely by clicking the “Off” switch and then turning it on again. If your frustration rather comes from the fact that the ads you have been seeing are not customised enough, this tab is also what you’ve been looking for.

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