Many of us have heard of expressed concern about the monitoring features built in the windows 10. Some of us have heard that Microsoft intends to port these “updates” back into Windows 7 and Windows 8. 

For those of us that are concerned about privacy, there’s some good news from the people that brought us Spybot Search and Destroy – The trusted anti-spyware tool used by so many in the industry.

Their new standalone tool, Spybot Anti-Beacon, has been released. It is designed to block and stop the tracking present in windows 10 and is also been modified to block similar functionality that exists or will exist in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

It seems to use some low-level registry settings/group policy settings (which are usually only leveraged an in active directory/domain environment) which can control a much deeper enforcement of the settings we care about, such as: telemetry, consumer experience improvement program, application impact telemetry, Wi-Fi sense/hotspot sharing, application advertising, and the peer-to-peer Windows update.

With the reputation Spybot has maintained over the years with regard to anti-spyware/anti-malware, this new utility looks to uphold the same high level standards and is also a free download from https://www.safer-networking.org/