This will prevent Cortana and some other apps from responding to voice commands, but eliminates a major privacy risk. Unless you want to trust Microsoft not to misuse your voice data, I suggest you disable online speech recognition. Indeed, Microsoft says that they, “will use your voice data to help improve our speech services.” That means that they listen to what you say and send it to Microsoft to be analyzed. Cortana and some other apps rely on online speech recognition capabilities provided by Microsoft. While it is very cool that Windows 10 can understand spoken commands, the way speech recognition works is a privacy risk. Next, scroll down the page and click the Speech privacy settings link. Since we want to disable Cortana to the maximum extent possible, I suggest you turn off everything: Location Contacts, email, calendar & communication history and Browsing history. On the page that appears, you can cut down on what information Cortana can see and use. On the Permissions page that appears, click the Manage the information Cortana can access from this device link. You should see a list of search results that looks something like this: On the Windows Settings page, enter Cortana into the Find a setting box. What we are going to do here is everything we can do to prevent Cortana from functioning, without resorting to hacking the registry or creating local group policies. While there are some technical tricks to completely disable Cortana, they are beyond the scope of this article. It seems that they really want us to use Cortana, whether we want to or not. Unfortunately, one of the changes Microsoft made in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update was to eliminate the option to shut Cortana down completely. I’ll simply say that most people who value their privacy want to shut Cortana down completely. Why? Because of the huge amounts of personal data that Cortana scoops up and the way it shares your personal data with Microsoft. It is also perhaps the feature most hated by privacy advocates.

Put Limits on CortanaĬortana is the digital assistant built into Windows 10. We’ll also discuss using Windows in virtual machines (VMs) for more privacy and security.

Make Windows stop hiding stuff from you.Set app permissions for maximum privacy.Make privacy-friendly apps the default apps.From here we can make the following changes, which we will methodically cover below.

Windows 10 o&o shut up