wallabydesigns/windows-telemetry-guard

TelemetryGuard is a Windows 10 and 11 toolkit that turns off many of the telemetry and tracking features built into the operating system, while keeping every change fully reversible. Before it changes anything, it saves a timestamped backup of the current settings, so running the revert command restores the machine to exactly the state it was in before the tool was applied. There are two ways to use it. The core is a PowerShell script with no extra dependencies beyond Windows PowerShell itself, run with a Status, Apply, or Revert mode. There is also a small desktop app built with Rust and egui that wraps the same script with a status dashboard and one-click Apply and Revert buttons, requesting the administrator permissions it needs along the way. In its default balanced mode, the tool adjusts about 36 registry policy settings, covering things like turning diagnostic data down to the lowest level Windows allows, disabling advertising ID tracking, turning off activity history and cloud clipboard syncing, blocking typing and speech data collection, and disabling tailored content suggestions. It also disables two background services responsible for uploading telemetry data, and turns off eleven scheduled tasks tied to diagnostics and usage reporting. A stricter mode can additionally remove web search results from the Start menu and block a list of known Microsoft telemetry domains through the hosts file, marked with clear begin and end comments so a revert removes exactly what was added. The README is explicit that the tool never touches Windows Update, Microsoft Defender, the Store, or activation, and it does not claim to block every possible telemetry channel. On the Windows Pro edition, Microsoft does not honor a fully off diagnostic setting, so TelemetryGuard compensates by stopping the underlying upload service directly. A big Windows feature update can sometimes turn a disabled setting back on, so the author recommends re-checking status after major updates. The project is released under the MIT license.