Windows 10 Privacy Options on Your PC

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

The Windows 10 Settings app features a long list of privacy settings on your PC. These allow you to control which programs or apps have access to specific PC features as well as how your personal information is shared between apps.

To view the slate of privacy settings, heed these directions:

Press Win + I to open the Settings app.
Click the big and obvious Privacy button.

In the Settings app, categories appear on the left side of the window, and individual settings appear on the right. For Privacy, the top category is General, and it lists several settings on the right, each of which is an on-off toggle.

If privacy is a concern to you, you may want to deactivate every setting in all the privacy categories: Choose each category in turn, and then reset any On toggles to the Off position.

For some settings, you may see a prompt when a program or an app attempts to access a feature you’ve flagged as private. For example, some Windows apps use the microphone. Only by enabling the microphone hardware privacy setting can those apps actually use the PC’s microphone.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.