Chapter 6
Protecting Your Privacy
IN THIS CHAPTER
Finding out why privacy is important
Viewing and limiting the data Microsoft collects through Windows 11
Reducing the ads you see in Windows 11
Blocking location tracking
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
— Jeff Hammerbacher, early Facebook employee
When you work with “free” services — search engines such as Google and Bing; social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn; online storage services such as OneDrive and Google Drive; email services such as Gmail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo! Mail — these services may not charge you anything, but they’re hardly free. You pay for them with your privacy. Every time you go to one of these sites or use one of these products, with a few noteworthy exceptions, you leave a trail that companies are eager to exploit, primarily for advertising.
The exceptions? Google doesn’t scan activity for any paid account or any educational account. Apple swears it doesn’t wallow in the data-grabbing cesspool. Microsoft loves to say it doesn’t ...
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