14 DAY TRIAL // Now that we explained how you can check if Windows 10 collects Activity History data without your permission, let’s move to the next step and detail how you can actually stop this secret process from happening on your Windows 10 device.
As we already discussed, simply disabling Activity History from Settings on Windows 10 is no longer enough, as for some reason the operating system ignores your choice and continues to collect information regarding your activity on the device.
And what’s more, it also uploads the data to Microsoft, allowing it to sync between devices should you want Windows Timeline to work on more than one machine.
Fortunately, there are two other ways to block Activity History on a Windows 10 device, as you can turn to the Registry Editor and the Group Policy Editor to do the same thing. The latter, however, only works on Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise, while the Registry Editor trick can be used on Windows 10 Home as well.
In both cases, you’re going to need an administrator account for both hacks, as standard accounts aren’t allowed to make such changes to the system.
Normally, in Windows 10 you should be able to disable Activity History from Settings using the following location:
Settings > Privacy > Activity history
But because this method no longer works, here’s how you can do the same thing with the aforementioned methods:
Group Policy Editor
Launch the Group Policy Editor by just clicking the Start menu and typing gpedit.msc. Navigate to the following path in the Group Policy Editor:
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\OS Policies
On the right side of the screen, there should be at least two policies, and one of them lets you disable Activity History. It’s called:
Allow publishing of User Activities
By default, it should be set to Not Configured, so double-click the policy and then change its mode to Disabled.
There are two additional policies that are worth disabling, just to make sure that Activity History is blocked completely:
Enable Activity Feed
Allow publishing of User Activities
Follow the same steps as before and set both of them to Disabled. Simply saving the changes should apply your settings and Activity History should be blocked entirely.
Registry Editor
The Registry Editor method basically comes down to defining the aforementioned policy manually. So the first thing to do now is to launch the Registry Editor by typing regedit.exe in the Start menu.
Then, navigate to the following path in the Registry Editor:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System
On the right side of the screen, there should be a policy that is called:
PublishUserActivities
If it does not exist, you can simply create it manually by just right-clicking in the right pane and then go to New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Use the name mentioned above.
Depending on the value that you give to PublishUserActivities you can allow the Activity History tracking or not.
Value 0 = Disabled
Value 1 = Enabled
If you want to disable Activity History on your device, double-click this new item and input value 0. Reboot your system and now Activity History should be blocked completely.
Until now, I’ve seen mixed reports on whether these two methods are effective or not. While some say they do not block Activity History, others claim they do, and no data collection happens anymore.
We’re still waiting for more information from Microsoft, as the software giant has until now remained completely tight-lipped on what exactly happens and why the user configuration is ignored in Windows 10. The two methods, however, will continue to work even after Microsoft fixes the Settings issue.