Blocking Windows 10 telemetry destinations with Windows Firewall

Question

Is is effective at all?

As it commonly known, Windows introduced plenty of allegedly diagnostics collection tools which collect our private data and send this info to MS servers.
Is it efficient and reasonable to block them by means of Windows Firewall? This seems equivalent to putting the cat among the pigeons, i.e. quite useless.
It is naïve to force Windows to protect user from itself. I have a strong suspicion that disregard of firewall rules Windows Firewall will always pass all requests that are treated as "internal" or OS-related. Am I wrong?

Now I use router-level firewall and assume this measure as a most efficient in this case.

Answer 1

There are two competing tools that accomplish the goal of blocking Windows 10 Telemetry

• Anti-Beacon by the makers of Spybot S&D
• ShutUp10 by O&O Software GmbH

which to use is subjective and I will let you make your own choice.

In terms of using Windows own firewall ... unsure, but to the best of my knowledge both of these programs make use of the hosts file which seems to work just fine. Something that you have to understand is that as much as M$ wants to spy on you ... this OS is also used by businesses and the government / military ... while im sure M$ could write a backdoor in there own firewall I suspect it would cost them more government contracts then it would gain them in analytics / advertising.

Answer 2

WindowsSpyBlocker has a great set of rules (spy, update and extra) in many format (OpenWRT, DNSCrypt, P2P, Proxifier...) :

• data/<type>/winX/spy.txt : Block Windows Spy / Telemetry
• data/<type>/winX/update.txt : Block Windows Update
• data/<type>/winX/extra.txt : Block third party applications

If you want to use the Windows Firewall, you can use the application to add rules like it's said in the official wiki.