13
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
13 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
42293 readers
942 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
A lot of those call-home processes can be blocked with your .host file. Additionally, PrivacySexy, WPD, and or O&OShutUp can help strip out all the crap. I hear a lot of people saying that updates to Windows revert the changes. I'm not sure if that is relevant to whether you are using Home or Pro. I use W10Pro and I have not seen any of my updates revert any of my changes. I believe Enterprise also doesn't revert the changes upon updates. It might also be that major feature updates (like the 22H2 upgrade), may revert the changes, however, it's fairly trivial to run PrivacySexy after the update.
It happened a few times to me during major updates, but most don’t restore packages you’ve removed. They do change other things, though.
I recently wrote this small guide: https://fuckbigtech.neocities.org/#06, and I was just about to re-read it to update, for example: Last time I was on Win11, the Windows Update had downloaded the HEIF and AV1 codecs, they were even listed in the app list to uninstall if I wanted, but they didn’t come with the laptop I have now, nor were they added through updating it. I just noticed folders weren’t displaying AVIF image thumbnails after I had debloated (and removed Windows Store). Then I discovered you can no longer download Windows utilities through their site, and it won’t work directly through PowerShell either because all download and installation is forced through Windows Store. I had already debloated extensively, so I decided to just factory-reset the laptop. This time, I downloaded both packages before removing Windows Store. Guess what? Removing Windows Store also removed the packages! So here I am, after another factory reset, leaving Windows Store there, hoping the lack of it doesn’t fuck me in the future lol
fun story: I also discovered it no longer comes with Notepad, Paint and Calculator! You have to download all from the Store, and they integrated with Copilot lol - it did come with Outlook, Maps, Teams and other crap, though... even some hidden legacy Zune, IE and Skype packages..
Interesting. I must live in bizarro world. I wonder if it has to do with Win11's new advertising platform. Were you running a local account or hooked up to the mothership? I'm running W10 on a local account only. Additionally, I'm blocking the world (almost - lol) in my host file.
I just ran
Get-AppxPackageand besides the runtimes, wsl, Microsoft.VCLibs, NET.Native.Frameworks, Microsoft.Windows.Photos (blocked from calling home), I don't see anything that would throw a red flag. I am definitely intrigued.My father loves '00s and late '90s RTS games, so I built him a Win7 PC. I got a bit jealous of how tight its running lol
Pre-built systems, though, come with way waaay more bloat. To get a free Windows license included in the product, they shove tons of shit in. My mother had a Win10 LG All-in-One, and I recently reset and cleared it to give to my niece, I had to remove a lot of crap, but it was way worse in the Win11 Dell All-in-One she got to replace it. I’ve never seen anything like that, shit came with Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Candy Crush... and, worst of all: McAfee. This Win11 laptop I'm using right now came with Norton hehe - but those Bing News, Bing Weather, Bing Maps, Bing This, Bing That, all the Xbox stuff, which you need to remove through command prompt, they were in all of them. However, I’ve never tested a Win10 or Win11 that wasn't on a pre-built device, my guess is that if you bought a license (or acquired some other way, I don't judge hehe) and installed the OS yourself it is way cleaner... but also surely Win11 is worse than Win10 on bloat.
edit: I had written Avast but it was actually McAfee, it wasn't even full license and it expired, also it constantly hijacked the browser and changed the search engine to Bing... pure malware behavior, crazy stuff.
I know, it's normal that after a good Windows release always follow an crappy one, independent from the bloatware which it always have. W7 good, W8 crap, W10 good, W11 crap...., but at least, for an advanced user possible always to gut all of these trash and even eliminate this crappy Fisher Price UI in W11, which try badly to imitate the UI of an Mac, eliminating, I don't know why, a lot of setting to customize the UI, needing scripts to do it.
Windows Defender will pick up any alterations to hosts file and revert it back to default. You have to whitelist the file before setting up any changes.
I use Hostsman, and I haven't found that to be true, but again, I don't discount it either.