More than a year ago, Microsoft launched a privacy dashboard that enabled users to gain more control over personal data. It was later revealed that this move was a response to numerous concerns raised by Swiss Regulators over the company"s employed methods of users" data collection on Windows 10. European Authorities still weren"t satisfied after this attempt at transparency, however, which led to Microsoft revealing further details of the data being collected in any user"s operating system (OS).
Although it is safe to say that concerns over Microsoft"s telemetry data collection methods still haven"t been alleviated, privacy backers might finally be getting the tools which they"ve been asking of for years. Apparently, two new commands have been added to the latest Insider Preview builds that indicate further transparency over data collection from Microsoft"s end.
These commands have been added under "Diagnostics & Feedback" in the Privacy tab under Settings. Interestingly, this section was previously termed "Feedback & diagnostics" and did not hold a prominent position on the list of Privacy settings. As can be observed from the mentioned names, these new options are meant to help users clearly view all diagnostic data, and even enable them to delete it. Moreover, the "Speech, Inking, & Typing" tab under Privacy settings now also includes a View User Dictionary command that displays a list of saved data.
Windows 10 builds 17063 and 17074 were released to the Fast ring in the past few weeks. Both builds contained the same new commands, although the changelogs did not explicitly refer to these additional settings. However, this makes sense as both the aforementioned diagnostic data related commands are currently inoperable, although they are expected to be functioning by the time the next major feature update is released.
It will be interesting to see how Windows 10 users react to the upcoming privacy tools. Do note that Microsoft has not released any official details regarding the new options as of yet. However, the functionality of these commands is fairly obvious from the way they"ve been named.
Source and image: ZDNet