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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.

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  • 2
    Flip the script, change OS to something less "hungry" of your privacy.
    – Mirsad
    Jan 22, 2017 at 15:04

2 Answers 2

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

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.

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  • Well, I am almost sure MS implemented a backdoor there, hence is my question.
    – Suncatcher
    Jan 4, 2017 at 11:39
  • If you have doubts, that will not be calmed by an answer here. Your only only way then is to monitor network traffic with firewall on an off
    – g.pickardou
    Feb 28, 2021 at 5:47
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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.

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