You need Win10 Enterprise LTSB, even Pro is not enough to get out of Microsoft telemetry capture, including crash dumps (memory with sensitive info), keystrokes, screen grabs.

It used to be that Pro was enough when you could still turn the telemetry off (I seem to remember that being a thing in W10's early days, correct me if I'm wrong). But in the end, why should the user have to spend even more for a feature set that they'll never use to just protect their privacy? Greed and dark patterns are not acceptable.

Can you even buy enterprise as a private person? All I can see on their webpage is "request a quote" and the form requires a business name.

When I was researching this for personal use a while ago it looked like there should be a way to get a subscription for Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7/mo/user via third-party sellers [1] (CSP?). It looks like you can buy a subscription from CDW [2] (I've never used them).

[1]: https://blogs.windows.com/business/2016/09/01/windows-10-ent...

[2]: https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-enterprise-e3-from-cd...

There's a 90-day trial, could be useful in a VM: https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...

Windows 10 Enterprise is enough to disable tracking, you don't need LTSB for that (for those who don't know, LTSB/LTSC is a version of Windows without "modern" apps, like the Store or Edge)

> You need Win10 Enterprise LTSB

The won't sell it to you. I asked about it a Microsoft store and they had no way of selling it to me.

Please correct me if I'm wrong because Microsoft licensing is convoluted. I think the procedure is to acquire a Windows 10 Enterprise license, and then you install LTSB instead of the standard enterprise edition.

It may also be available via MSDN, subject to MSDN terms.

My guess: Will probably stay that way unless they suffer a major breach an this data starts showing up in wrong places.

Can you block it using a Pi-hole?

Of course, I have long since added this list[1] to my openbsd firewall. That is besides the point, I can (and do) also block all crap in my browser via extensions. That doesn't make the crap they are pulling legal and I refuse to click "accept" on the popup that is currently locking the machine from being used. If it does not change soon I will reclaim the license money via microsoft directly or court.

All my important machines run operating systems that do not have spyware built-in.

[1] https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker

That'll work while they continue to use dedicated hosts (eg, telemetry.microsoft.com) to collect the exfiltrated data. With a single update they can shift that collection stream to another host (windowsupdate.microsoft.com, or a skype host, etc) such that blocking it would break other stuff