Privacy is a very important factor for users. Today our data is of great value online and we may encounter many problems that affect us. Many marketing companies can use methods to steal information and subsequently include us in spam campaigns, send us targeted advertising or even sell that data to third parties. There are many varieties of malware that are intended to spy on us and it is something that affects all types of operating systems. Luckily we can make use of tools that help us avoid these problems. In this article we are going to talk about Spydish , which is a free program for Windows 10 that aims to verify the privacy settings of Group Policy.
Spydish, the tool to control privacy in Group Policy
Spydish is a simple and straightforward tool designed for Windows 10 . Its role is to give users an overview of the important privacy settings in Group Policy. As we know, there are many configurations that we can find when using the Microsoft operating system, but not all of them are going to favor our privacy and security. Sometimes we can have a bad configuration that can expose our data.
At the moment this privacy tool is a trial version, but fully functional. We can download the file from GitHub and it is not necessary to install anything. We simply have to unzip the ZIP file and run it. It barely occupies 35 KB and once we have unzipped it we simply have to run it with administrator permissions.
Its function is very simple. Once we open it, it will show us a series of privacy policies and settings that we have configured or that we can configure in Windows 10. It allows us to verify at a glance all those options. We can click on any of them or even all of them and give it to analyze. This way it will show us which are configured and which are not. All this in a simple and visual way.
As we see, the policies are grouped into groups. We can select all at once, for example those of Cortana, or go one by one. We can block telemetry, prevent automatic application installations, disable the Bing search engine, disable Windows Defender …
All the changes we make can be easily reversed. In addition we simply have to mark the option or options that we want and we give it to analyze to check if they are configured or not.
Quick summary of privacy settings
Ultimately, users can use the app to get a quick summary of privacy settings on a Windows 10 machine. Also, it is useful to restore the policies to their default values or enable certain private policies on a device. The latter may be especially interesting on Windows 10 Home systems as Group Policy is not available on these systems although policies can be set using the Registry. The app can provide a faster way to do it.
As we have mentioned, it is a tool still on a test basis but it is fully functional. It is open source and we can find it on GitHub. Something interesting is that it does not need installation, since it is simply enough to execute the file that we can download.
Maintaining a good configuration regarding privacy and security can avoid problems. We have seen on many occasions that the programs that we have on our computers may contain malicious functions that expose our data. That personal information that the programs can control could be exposed to possible intruders who, in one way or another, gain access to our equipment.
Therefore, it is essential that we always pay attention when configuring aspects related to data privacy. In this sense, Spydish, a simple tool as we have seen, can help to better manage the privacy settings in Windows 10, which is the most widely used operating system today.