How to Disable Telemetry Across Windows and Popular Applications

Fair warning: even if you disable telemetry on Windows, it has a tendency and history of re-enabling itself after a major update. You shouldn't expect it to be a one-and-done deal.

Obviously, the most effective approach is to reduce the vector by not using them, or in some of these cases (NVIDIA, AMD, etc) only installing the drivers and not the additional software.

Other than that, the most effective approach I've found is analyzing and blocking the traffic at the router level.

I don't use Windows or Adobe and things like that (I use Linux and before that I was running a Mac), but for VSCode you may consider using VSCodium instead which is the exact same app (the same source code, running the same extensions) just without MS telemetry.

https://vscodium.com/

O&O Shutup10 is the most straightforward for Windows. You can run it every once in a while to see if anything’s changed, and it will let you know.

I’d switch to Windows but I don’t want to use an OS that requires digging through shady online instructions and running random power shell scripts in order to stop it from spying on me until the next update.

I disabled telemetry on Linux(Arch, btw) by not installing enshittified corporate spyware masquerading as an operating system.

Are there any open-source tools that allow me to disable telemetry for Adobe,

Ocular/Scribus

Windows, Microsoft

Linux, Linux Foundation

NVIDIA, AMD

The drivers don’t have telemetry, it’s the software that comes with it.

On Linux you can just install the driver from your package manager without the need for any third party applications.

GitHub Desktop,

https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis?os=linux

Docker Desktop,

docker + https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Docker#Front-ends

VS Code

VS Codium, open source VS Code.

nvim if you want your (programming) life changed

and other applications?

https://aur.archlinux.org/

I recently discovered ReviOS. I just did a clean re-install of Windows with it. And its been great for the last few days. No dumb bloatware or spyware. Though not so privacy crazy as to break things. Supposedly it's changes can't be rolled back with updates due to the techniques they use. We'll see

There are a couple of things that can be done. Do keep in mind that most of these require some maintenance and checking, since windows updates are notorious for re enabling stuff:

• for windows itself, there are utilities like o&o shutup windows. This usually works quite well to go into the well hidden reg options to disable telemetry
• another good advice is to use such tool to straight up uninstall what ships with windows that you don't need
• at the network level in your house, having a DNS block level service is great. Pihole and adguard come to mind. This solution is more involved and requires more time to setup, but has tremendous benefits not only on windows telemetry, but overall network telemetry
• if you are not in the capacity to have a network level service, setting up the machine to use nextdns is another good step. It is also a DNS block level kind of solution, but works by pointing the machine to the DNS to be used system wide. Do keep in mind is certainly possible for the system in places to use hardcoded DNS and ignore your options (at network level, you can always force to reroute to your local DNS. The case of DoH is a bit more tricky)

Hopefully this helps

If you have to use Windows, there are at least two mandatory apps

https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer

https://safing.io/

What was it, Glasswire? Tinywall? Them!

It might be a more extreme method, but I use Pi-Hole on my home network running on a Raspberry Pi.

It's more investment than tweaking some Windows settings or configuring a router, but it does a decent job of blocking a lot of telemetry and tracking.

Most of my denied queries listed on the Pi-Hole dashboard are Microsoft based.

I have to use my Pi-Hole as my DHCP server though, otherwise all traffic seems to only come from one device... my router.

If you have a server running at home, Pi-Hole can also be hosted in a Docker container.

Rather than a tool, what about blocking via the hosts file. There must be some hosts files out there that do this for Windows 11.

I use this - https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

But obviously get opinions from other sources first.

It claims to disable most Windows telemetry. Some Adobe. But I haven't actually done any testing to prove it's the case. It's a pretty useful tool. Just use the restore point option first.

Last time I tried this method of disabling Adobe telemetry, photoshop stopped opening after a few days.

For nvidia/amd, just install the drivers, not their tool suite.

As the other posters mention, try to find alternatives.

Other than that, you can try and block at a firewall level. But few companies make it obvious like: http://nerferoustelemetry.pleasedontblockthis.adobe.com/