Did Microsoft Windows track your location ? Did Cortana send your voice clips to Microsoft ?

In an effort to be more transparent, Microsoft revealed more about what data Windows 10 Creators Update will collect from users' PCs and clarified what the privacy settings mean. The company has never said precisely what data it collects behind these options, which raised huge privacy concerns among privacy-conscious users.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, which will be available from April 11 for users to download for free, comes with a revamped Privacy settings section.

During the process of upgrading to the Creators Update, you will be displayed a new Privacy Settings screen that will ask you to toggle the following features:

• Location – Allow Windows and apps to request your location and share that data with Microsoft.
• Speech Recognition – Allow Cortana and Windows Store apps to recognize your voice and send that data to Microsoft to improve speech recognition.
• Tailored experiences with diagnostic data – Allow Microsoft to use diagnostic data from your computer to offer tips and recommendations.
• Relevant ads – Allow apps to use advertising IDs to show ads more interesting to you based on your app usage.

Till now there are three options (Basic, Enhanced, Full) for Windows 10 users to select from under its diagnostics data collection section, with no option for users to opt out of sending their data to Microsoft.

Microsoft published a massive list of diagnostics data – both the Basic and Full levels of diagnostics:

• Basic – The Basic level collects a limited set of data that is critical for understanding the device and its configuration. This data includes basic device information, quality-related information, app compatibility and Windows Store.
• Full – The Full level collects data for the following nine categories: common data, software setup and inventory data, product and service usage data, browsing, search and query data, content consumption data, linking, typing, and speech utterance data and licensing and purchase data.

Windows 10 Mobile users will see a similar privacy dashboard, though phones have a cellular data toggle and no tailored experiences option.

With Windows 10’s focus on Windows as a service and built-in cloud-based features like Cortana, the company has stirred a lot of privacy concerns. This new transparency gives users a better sense of what information is being collected—and why. The new privacy dashboards also put in one place most of the personal information the operating system wants to use on a regular basis.