Online Privacy

[Stingray]

The thing with Enterprise is that is gives you way more control over updates, telemetry, and so on, through the group policy system. You can take complete control over update behaviour in way you can't on the consumer versions. I don't know much about the upgrade nags, specifically, but I suspect in enterprise you can prevent that entirely - the IT dept wants to control their own update strategy, not have users being encouraged to do OS upgrades.

I'm not aware of any update or general group policy related features that are available on Enterprise but not Pro. (And it's part of my job to know this stuff, or at least the bits of it that matter to my company, which is pretty much nothing in Enterprise.) Last I heard, there is one telemetry setting in group policy that can only be used on Enterprise and not Pro (you can't fully turn it to "off" in Pro). Enterprise mostly adds specific features, not general manageability. All the general stuff is in Pro.

As far as managed updates go, the most common ways I know of to do that is WufB, WSUS, or Configuration Manager. I've used all of those, and I don't think any of them have any limitations on the Pro version.

 

[Ripper]

There's definitely a few more, and some of them are pretty significant. With enterprise you can shut down most of the garbage that gets installed as 'Microsoft Consumer Experience', reduce telemetry to a bare minimum, and easily control update behaviour. If one happened to be the sort of naughty individual who would download a clean ISO of Enterprise Edition, check its hash, and persuade it to stick around beyond the evaluation period, you can appreciate the difference.

 

[Stingray]

I didn't mean to imply that there weren't a few other group policy items that were only in Enterprise, I only mentioned telemetry specifically because you mentioned it in your post.

But like I said, I don't think there's any difference between Pro and Enterprise in "controlling update behavior". What are you referring to?

 

[Ripper]

Right, but I think respecting the one major telemetry setting is a big one - you can set 'telemetry = 0', or you can't. Same with the disabling of the consumer bloatware.

I'm honestly not sure exactly how much difference there is between Pro and Enterprise with regard to having defferent update settings, or having different limits - I think there are some? I was saying I'm not sure what the difference between home and pro is in that regard - but I am familiar with where we are on Enterprise.

I'd just proceed from the Enterprise version, where those key things for me are easily and cleanly done.

 

[Redglyph]

Chrome's Incognito mode, and other browsers' private mode, doesn't really provide privacy because the websites can still track your activity. Google has been naughty again, since Google Analytics (70% of the analytic market) was tracking users even when they thought they were in a private sesssion, which was reinforced by the misleading text shown in Chrome in that mode.

After being involved for years in a class action lawsuit, the company finally decided to settle in December and aggreed to delete the data yesterday.

Google to delete records from Incognito tracking

The search giant will block third party tracking by default for people searching the web in private mode.

www.bbc.com

 

[pibbuR]

Google's latest project could help protect you against cookie theft

Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) will make stealing your cookies more difficult.

www.zdnet.com

pibbuR who observes CodeProject's (humorous) comment: "Well, protect you from *other companies* stealing your cookies"

 

[Redglyph]

Brave seems like a good browser. I like that you don't have to confirm the cookie settings for every single website, but I don't know what it entails. I assume it refuses selected cookies based on a database, but I haven't checked (yet).

The EC shouldn't only have restricted the use of cookies, as it made it a major issue while browsing. They should have proposed a framework allowing the user to set default preferences to avoid those repetitive pop-ups. It seems so easy to do.