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Windows offers a lot of great features, but sometimes the privacy concerns surrounding them might turn you away. Still, some of these features can be useful—and even worth letting Windows invade your privacy a little.
1Location Services
Screenshot by Pankil Shah – No attribution required
As you can probably guess, enabling location services on your Windows device has the same benefits as using them on your phone. As someone who frequently travels around and likes to check up on routes before leaving home, I often use Google Maps in my browser to check directions. Without location services, this functionality wouldn’t be possible.
Another, more common scenario where your PC uses location services is for apps and websites to figure out what region of the world you’re in without manual input all the time. Content like movies, TV shows, or games might vary in availability from region to region, and with apps having access to your location, they’ll be able to automatically give you access to what’s available.
Windows also uses your location data to power small widgets and features peppered across the OS. Information like weather, time, and the Find My Device feature on Windows 11 also uses location services (along with Wi-Fi) to figure out where your device is located in case you lose it.
2Shared Experiences
The Shared Experiences feature on Windows lets you carry over a task you were doing on your computer to your phone. Additionally, it also enables Nearby Share and other remote controls and companion apps on your phone, like Phone Link.
Syncing content like emails, notifications, and more between devices requires logging in with an account, not to mention giving the sync service access to your data so that it can be ferried between your devices. Privacy concern? Yes. Massive convenience? Also, yes.
Microsoft has admittedly used some shady practices here, such as enabling the feature by default in Windows 10 or tucking it away under app settings in Windows 11. But if you’re a fan of how well the sync between Macs and iPhones works, this is as close you’ll get in Windows.
3Content Search and Content History
Ever wondered how files or folders you’ve searched for in Windows come up so quickly the next time you’re looking for them? Windows has a few neat tricks up its sleeve to help you quickly find what you’re looking for, it just takes a few invasive measures to get there.
In Windows 11, Content Search refers to your PC’s ability to search for files based on the contents within, instead of simply using the file name. As you can probably guess, this makes finding files like documents and spreadsheets incredibly easy. If you deal with a large number of documents and aren’t good at properly naming or organizing them, this feature’s got your back.
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Content History keeps track of what you’re searching for on your PC. You can disable it, but if you find yourself searching for the same files repeatedly, this feature can come in handy.
4Windows Recall
Windows Recall is perhaps the most controversial feature that Microsoft has launched in a long time. As concerning as your PC taking random screenshots of what you’re doing is, it can be a massive help if you need to look for something and don’t fully remember what the file or folder is called—a situation I’ve been in more times than I care to count.
The feature works by taking periodic screenshots of what you’re doing on your PC and then using CoPilot to search through them in order to help you find what you’re doing.Recall is a privacy nightmare for some, but a convenience for others.
Recall was especially controversial at first due to security vulnerabilities in the feature’s first implementation that had the potential to leak sensitive data captured by it. However, Microsoft claims to have fixed these since, making Recall a viable feature to use, if you don’t mind the method behind it.
5Sharing Diagnostic Data
This is an obvious one, but as is the case with pretty much every product in the world, Microsoft collects feedback and data from its users to help improve Windows for everyone. For most software products, this data is collected in the form of diagnostics data which often includes the make and model of your device, hardware specifications, what version of Windows you’re running, as well as your name, email, and other personal information.
All of this data is collected from millions of computers running various Windows versions from around the world, sent to Microsoft, and then used to make Windows or its apps and features better. Sure, that’s concerning when you break it down like that. However,Microsoft knows a lot about your PCanyway. So while you can turn this feature off—and nobody would blame you if you did—it can also help identify issues that Microsoft needs to fix.
We’re not suggesting that you give up all your data readily to Microsoft just to make your life easier. However, as AI products and services continue to integrate into our daily lives, data collection is only going to become more prevalent. A feature might be really convenient, but if you’re going to be paying for said convenience with your privacy you might as well get some benefits out of it.
