Privacy

39154 readers

863 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Could Windows and installed apps upload all my personal files? (lemmy.world)

submitted 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by happeningtofry99158@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Could Windows and installed apps upload all my personal files?

Dear all

I have deleted Onedrive and disabled File system access in Privacy.

I would like to know, which other ways that my personal files could be uploaded in a non-malicious non-hacker way?
Just by using Windows, Microsoft could upload all my personal files to themselves if they would?
Does every installed App / software have full access to my whole drive? How can I found out, how much access it has?

Thank you for your interest and reply

Best regards

@Rikudou_Sage@lemmy.world

Yes, every application has access to everything. The only exception are those weird apps that use the universal framework or whatever that thing is called, those need to ask for permissions. But most of the apps on your PC have full access to everything.

And Windows does collect and upload a lot of personal information and they could easily upload everything on your system. The same of course applies for the apps as well, they have access to everything except privileged folders (those usually don’t contain your personal data, but system files).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] reddeadhead@awful.systems 4 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

As for restricting access to files you could run them under a separate user account. User A shouldn't have access to User B's home folder. Although if its something that would need granted admin access I think it would have access to other users files again.

[–] happeningtofry99158@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

thanks

does this mean software with admin privilege only have access to user folder not root folder of C drive?

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Things with admin privilege have access to everything. If it is only user-privileged, it only has access to what that user was granted access to.

[–] happeningtofry99158@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

Thank you very much for the e