If you are connected to the internet, you are almost certainly being tracked and your activities monitored and recorded. So, what does Microsoft and Windows 10 know about you? Download it!
Hardly a week goes by without one company or another revealing that they were hacked or were loose with security and lost customer data – your data that is. Sometimes millions of accounts are compromised.
Data can be stolen, it can be misused, or it can end up in the wrong hands, then people and companies can use it in ways that might be damaging to you or others. Facebook has been in the news recently regarding sharing of up to 87 million users’ data with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook is not the only company that that tracks you and Microsoft has had its fair share of critics with the amount of data that Windows 10 collects about you. If you are running Microsoft’s latest OS then some, maybe a lot, of data is being sent back to the company. Some data may be anonymous, but some is linked to your Microsoft account and stored on Microsoft servers.
What does Microsoft know about you?
Is it possible to find out what information Microsoft has collected and stored about you? Yes, and you can download it and see it for yourself. You may be surprised what has been recorded. Some people may have just a small amount of data stored, but others may have a lot. Here’s how to access it.
1 Log in to your account
Open a browser and go to account.microsoft.com and log in with your Microsoft account ID (Outlook.com, OneDrive, Xbox username and password).
2 Go to Privacy
Select Privacy in the menu bar to open the Privacy dashboard and then click Download your data. A little way down the page is a button CREATE NEW ARCHIVE. Click it and the site will gather all of the data from the Activity history tab into a zip archive.
3 Select the data
You can choose which data you want to download by ticking boxes next to each activity that is tracked. Tick them all if you want to see everything and then click Create archive.
4 Download your data
Scroll down the page to the Archives section and wait. It can take a minute or two to create the file and when it finally appears, click the Download link to save it to disk
5 Browse your data
Extract the zip archive afterwards and the data that Microsoft is storing can be browsed. The .json files are plain text and can be loaded into Notepad for reading. There are things like your web browsing history, precise user location, product and service usage and so on. It is not too difficult to understand in Notepad.
6 Listen to yourself
Open the folder InkingTypingAndSpeechUtterance. It consists of a collection of audio files and these are recordings of the things you have said to Cortana. They are stored as MP4 files and can be played in any audio player. Double click a file to open it and hear yourself talking, or simply select a file, select the Play tab and click Play or Play all.
Is it amusing listening to yourself talking or is it shocking that Microsoft is storing all these audio recordings of you? It is a bit of both really. At least now you know what Microsoft has on you. Let’s hope it is stored securely.
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