Windows 10 monitors your activity even if you disabled this option

Windows 10 can ignore user settings and continue to keep track of activity even when it’s disabled in your settings.

Some Reddit users earlier disclosed that excluding Activity History in Windows 10 settings does not make any difference, as data is still being collected and sent to Microsoft.

Thanks to the way in which the History of Activity works, this thing is pretty easy to discover. So, basically, the History of Activity is based on the new Windows 10 feature called Timeline. The activity history allows the Windows Time Line to work on different devices. With Windows Timeline, users can save snapshots of their activities, including documents, browser tabs, and running programs, and return them at any time in the next 30 days.

This feature is enabled not only on the computer on which you work but also on other devices in which you are signed in with the same Microsoft account, thanks to the activity history.

Users are allowed to disable the Activity History, and for that matter, Windows 10 had offered three different options to users:

• keeping activity history on the device
• send it to Microsoft,
• to have Activity History configured for each account configured on the device.

But even if all of these options are disabled, which means that Activity History not only should not collect any information, nor send them to Microsoft servers, user data is still sent to Microsoft.

Your Privacy is Safe With Us

Microsoft obviously hasn’t got the problem with the matter, as there is an easy way to see this. When you are signed into a Microsoft account, you can access the Microsoft Privacy Dashboard, in order to manage the information that the company stores. Users can still see information from Activity History and those that should not be here if Activity History is off.

The first thing you need to do to check if your device has an activity history is to sign up for Windows 10, and then go to Settings> Privacy> Activity history. You have two options here that must be disabled: “Keep my activity history on this device” and “Send my activity history to Microsoft”. When you make sure both options are disabled, you need to turn off the activity history for each account on your system in the section called “Show activity from these accounts”.

This activity history should be disabled, and Microsoft should not receive any information about it. Unfortunately, this is still not the case.

We are still not completely sure why this feature ignores user settings. But, there is no doubt it represents a privacy issue that Microsoft needs to solve as soon as possible.