best one i have seen so far for win 10 https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/ turns off a ton of MS spying unless you use cortana, then nothing can be turned off at all!!
best one i have seen so far for win 10 https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/ turns off a ton of MS spying unless you use cortana, then nothing can be turned off at all!!
Are you guys aware of any independent assessment of the Anti-Beacon product? If so (and its functionality is verified), I would imagine that could become a VERY popular product for Win 10 users.
i got linked to a youtube video by an ex MS engineer who has a channel covering all kinds of tech stuff. he did a 30 minutes video on this and broke it down to what it does. i verified myself a lot of what it does including adding more than a dozen additions to the host file to block the telemetry ip and other stuff. i do not recall what the video is but i may be able to dig up the post again that lead me there if i think about it. however i do spend a lot of time reading up on security and privacy issues and this tool has started showing up a lot and is being recommended more and more from those type folks as well.
i do not have the ability to do any of the deep packet inspections and such that some people have reported on but between the services disabled, host file additions and other changes, i realize my info is very anecdotal and i can't source many of the reports here, i am satisfied with it for now until they finally get the full ability to disable it all done.
i can't find the original video as there are now a ton of videos abut the program now!! i did run across this one by majorgeeks.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6sVjYLIooo it runs down a handful of options and their features but does not really test or offer any recommendations. mostly just fyi
it does bring up that the donotspy 10 has added bloatware to the installer and possible malware from some sources.
If the product worked as advertised, it would sell like hotcakes. Adding bloatware to tools like this doesn't help with credibility.
It seems like it would be fairly easy to test the effectiveness of the tool with a network analyzer/sniffer. It would be good to see an independent assessment of similar products. I wouldn't imagine MS would enjoy such an assessment, however.
yah donotspy 10 was the first out there but then they got greedy and decided to pack it will bloatware. none of the others do this since most don't even install other than the spybot one. one nice thing the spybot one does, is you can set it to do a check at start-up to see if everything is still blocked. the video i saw had it block everything and then ran the updates and rebooted. the updates had changed almost all of the settings back to default after the update. anti-beacon will check at start-up and put it back the way you asked it to if anything gets changed like this.
i am not in a position to test any of these myself but would welcome seeing such a review of these options. for now i am satisfied with what i have seen from the spybot tool.