Your Windows PC is watching you right now.

Every app you open. Logged.
Every Start Menu search. Logged.
Every crash. Logged.
Every diagnostic ping. Logged.
Every hour your machine stays awake. Logged.

Microsoft calls it diagnostic data. It ships by default on 1.4 billion active Windows devices, and the real off-switches sit behind registry keys, group policies, and service configurations that no normal user ever finds.

Seven background services do the heavy lifting.

DiagTrack. Sends diagnostic reports and usage patterns to Microsoft servers.
Connected User Experiences and Telemetry. Ships device and error data back to Redmond.
Advertising ID. A unique identifier Windows assigns to your machine so apps can profile you.
Cortana speech collection. Runs even when you never open Cortana.
Bing web search integration. Every query typed in your Start Menu goes to Microsoft.
Start Menu recommendations. Ads inside the operating system you paid for.
Windows Timeline. Records which apps and files you opened and when.

A developer who goes by undergroundwires got tired of it. So he built a browser tool that catalogs every hidden switch and lets you flip them at once.

You open the site. A dashboard loads. Every tracking feature on Windows, macOS, and Linux is listed with a plain English explanation of what it does. You pick what to disable. Standard preset. Strict preset. Or check individual boxes.

The tool generates a script you can read line by line before you run it. Every change is reversible. A revert script undoes everything.

That is it. That is the whole product.

5,631 stars. AGPL-3.0 licensed. Works on Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS, and Linux. No installation. No account. No telemetry of its own. The tool that disables tracking does not track you.

Microsoft made 281 billion dollars in fiscal 2025. Windows is one of the products that funds that number.

You paid for the license. You paid for the laptop. You are still the product.

One developer with a browser tab took that back.

(Link in the comments)