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Have WinXP/Vista any kind of telemetry?


Sergiaws

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Vista certainly has it, as you can see it has a setting for the Customer Experience Improvement Program.
XP does not have that setting outright, but many microsoft add-on programs can add the option (such as Office, WMP, MSE)

That being said, a stock XP is in no way void of telemetry. Error Reporting is by default enabled. Also, if you use Windows Update, an amount of telemetry is sent when that is checking in with the server. That is what I know of, there may be some other things here and there.

As far as I know, add-on programs for XP will actually listen to the CEIP settings if you set it, unlike what happens in later OSes, such as 7.

You can find the setting for any CEIP compatible program inside that program's settings.
And, error reporting is disabled via system properties --> advanced --> error reporting

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17 hours ago, Sergiaws said:

I read that Microsoft introduced telemetry to Win7/8.1. What about WinXP/Vista?

One of the most notorious spies included in WIndows XP , that the previous poster didn't mention, are :

1 - Dr. Watson. It is running and if any Windows application crashes, Dr. Watson creates a report , guess what next.

Usually prepared reports go here  :

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson

More regarding this subject : https://hotcomm.com/FAQ/FAQ_drwatson.asp

2 - Alexa - it spies and reports all about the websites you visit .

Both can be removed with nLite and/or similar tools.

Or just insert this section to your nLite preset during the preparition of the setup.

This is only for removing Alexa , 'cause some may still want to use Dr. Watson for debugging. 

The first three lines are for your own choosing .

[Tweaks]

Privacy-Disable Driver Update Internet prompt

Privacy-Disable File MRU-List

Privacy-Disable Tracking of most used programs

Privacy-Remove Alexa

 
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3 hours ago, Sergiaws said:

But I have XP already installed. How can I remove these things in that case?

Step by step instructions on how to remove Alexa. But like they said : "This process is difficult", esp. for beginners ,

it is better to remove it before , like I suggested.

https://www.safer-networking.com/removealexa.php

To remove Dr.Watson watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfaohidTEKs

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I think we have to dig on the word "telemetry" here. Windows XP independent network activity wasn't called telemetry back then (at least from what I can tell here as a non-native speaker). Still, Windows XP is a chatty system in its standard settings. I don't measure this by today's (wasteful) standards for phoning home, it's a principle instead, that nothing should run except the stuff I was asking for.

You basically have to deactivate 80% of the Windows services (under msconfig). I think Windows Update is the worst one. The NTP time program syncronises the system clock with a server from the internet, but do you really know it doesn't send any other data of your computer over the network? I don't know, but I don't care either. Everything has to blocked, that I didn't ask for (that's my stubborn opinion of course)!

Therefore some entries to the dnsmasq.conf file of my OpenWRT router:
address=/microsoft.com/0.0.0.0
address=/*.microsoft.com/0.0.0.0
address=/a-msedge.net/0.0.0.0
address=/msftncsi.com/0.0.0.0
address=/windowsmedia.com/0.0.0.0
address=/windows.com/0.0.0.0
Blocking some Akamai servers was also necessary if I recall correctly.

Might be a bit bulldozer-style, but at least my Windows XP systems do what I tell them to do!

Attention: The Hosts file doesn't work to block Microsoft servers on Windows XP! It did on Windows 98, but they've put holes in it to still let the Microsoft servers pass through. The exact entries can be found in the system file "dnsapi.dll". You can throw it into your Notepad, press Ctrl+F and search for "microsoft.com". More filtered domains are about to appear...

Anyways, it's very likely that there was always "telemetry" in Windows XP. Too much suspicious network activity. Remember, it had to start somewhere to get where current Windows systems are now!

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It seems to me that the last Windows that was truly free of this stuff (in it's original, RTM form, not after subsequent updates) was Windows 95 and NT 3.51/4.0.

The "webification" movement, which began with Windows 98 (really, 95 OSR 2.5, aka 95 C) is probably where this all started.

To that point, in my opinion, the "telemetry" (or whatever one wants to call it) is relatively benign in Windows versions before 7, so I don't really feel too concerned by it.  And besides, with the TLS 1.0/1.1 apocalypse, most such services in XP/Vista probably don't even work anymore anyway (and the few that still do can be disabled fairly easily for the most part).

In my opinion, therefore, the main reason to block them all is primarily to increase efficiency and decrease wasteful use of system resources (which tend to be more scarce on most XP-era hardware) and internet bandwidth, not to protect privacy per se (quite frankly, staying away from Google, Facebook and Amazon (basically, staying off the Internet altogether, if possible) will do more to protect one's privacy than blocking XP's telemetry services).

c

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