Windows 10 sends your timeline or activity history to Microsoft, and does not seem to be asking for your permission ! It seems to log records of what you’re doing on your PC, and upload it to the cloud… but only if you’ve enabled this option. However, it seems that data collection takes place even when this option is disabled. This data is present online in the privacy control panel, demonstrating that collection takes place without users’ consent.

It all began with a thread on Reddit, by the user u/a_potato_is_missing where a user explains: “I completely deactivated the activity history and yet some applications are still listed in the privacy control panel of the Microsoft site. How can I stop this? “. The Activity History or Timeline logs all your interactions with computer applications and documents in the same way as your web browser does. Usually, it is possible to deactivate the Timeline under Settings > Privacy > Activity History.

Windows 10 collects your Timeline or Activity History

This section contains two options: “Allow Windows to collect my activities from this computer” to enable or disable the timeline and “Allow Windows to synchronize my activities from this computer in the cloud” to put your timeline in the cloud and synchronize it with all your devices. The problem is that even when the second option is off, Windows 10 sends the data to Microsoft servers. We were able to check this in our virtual machine where the option was never activated.

To make matters worse, clicking the “Delete” button in Delete activity history does not change anything: you can always consult your Timeline by consulting the page mentioned above. According to HowToGeek to disable this collection, you should go to the configuration pages of the diagnostic data collection in the configuration of your PC and choose Basic instead of Complete. The complete data collection, enabled by default, means that the information “about the websites you are looking for and how the applications and features are used” is sent to the Microsoft servers.

In other words, this extremely confused mess for the end user is a dangerous type, while pushing a large number of users to transmit this data to Microsoft without their knowledge. We hope that things will change and this will change quickly in a future update of the operating system.

Here is how you can deactivate this annoying feature: