By Ed Bott
Publication Date: 2026-02-27 13:27:00
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft collects diagnostic data, aka telemetry, from every Windows PC.
- Some Windows customers are convinced, without evidence, that this is a form of spying.
- If you’re concerned, you can use a free utility to inspect this data for yourself.
When Windows 10 was released in 2015, it was immediately controversial, with critics zeroing in on one feature in particular: telemetry.
I spent many months in those early days reading one article after another on the subject that read, in retrospect, like entries from the diary of a mad conspiracy theorist. As I wrote at the time, those critics believed that Windows 10 was “basically a 1984 telescreen come to life. They are convinced that with Windows 10 Microsoft has built a spying apparatus not seen since the height of the Cold War, scraping up every detail of your life and feeding it back to Redmond.”
Also by Ed Bott:
