If you are one of these people who are concerned about their private information, you can read this article. It will show you what SmartScreen is and how it works. Besides, it will also show you how to turn off SmartScreen if you do not want to expose your privacy.
What Is SmartScreen
In different places, Microsoft SmartScreen is officially called SmartScreen Filter, Windows Defender SmartScreen and Windows SmartScreen. Microsoft SmartScreen is an anti-malware and cloud-based anti-phishing component.
Anti-phishing and anti-malware support is one of the enhancements which SmartScreen provides. The SmartScreen can help to protect you from sites that may hosts distribute malicious software or phishing attacks. This is the URL reputation-based protection, so SmartScreen can evaluate the URLs and then determine whether they are known to host or distribute some unsafe contents.
To help protect you against attacks, Windows SmartScreen Windows 10 collects information about your browsing history and sends the information to Microsoft. Besides, it also warns you before you download potentially malicious content from the Internet.
Microsoft SmartScreen Raise Privacy Concerns
Although this feature strengthens your internet security, it may also expose a great deal of your sensitive and private information. Thus, Microsoft SmartScreen data collection raises privacy concerns today.
When you try to run your applications, Windows 10 will transmit a lot of private information about applications to Microsoft SmartScreen. Microsoft Edge will also upload the URLs to SmartScreen without obfuscating or hashing them first. That really raises concerns that Microsoft can track what sites you visit.
Disturbing as this news may be, Microsoft is at least fairly honest about what’s going on. It indicates that URLs are shared in the documentation.
As for the Chromium-based version of Edge, Microsoft chooses to continue sharing unhashed URLs and choose not to share SIDs. Still, the news comes as a surprise to regular Edge users who may not know their browsing habits are being shared by Microsoft.
Turn Off SmartScreen
If you are really worried that your private information will be exposed through Microsoft SmartScreen data collection, a useful way is that you can choose to disable Windows SmartScreen in Windows 10. Since Microsoft SmartScreen is a recommended function, you can simply turn off it by using Control Panel.
The following part will show you how to turn off Microsoft SmartScreen through Control Panel step by step.
Step 1: Firstly, type control panel in the search bar first and then click Control Panel to enter its interface.
Step 2: After you go into its interface, now select Security and Maintenance with the way View by Small icons to open it.
Step 3: In the Security and Maintenance section, select the Change Windows SmartScreen settings option to continue.
Step 4: Finally, check the Don’t do anything (turn off Windows SmartScreen) option from the pop-up window and then click OK to confirm the change you have made.
After you finish all the steps this part shown above, Microsoft SmartScreen function will be turned off successfully. Now you do not need to worry about your private information will be exposed because of Microsoft SmartScreen data collection.
If you receive the error “this app can’t run on your PC“, you can also disable SmartScreen to fix this issue.
Bottom Line
To sum up, this article has shown you how Microsoft SmartScreen works and why people concern about their privacy when the Microsoft SmartScreen feature is turned on. Meanwhile, you can turn off Microsoft SmartScreen following the steps above if you are worried about Microsoft SmartScreen data collection. Hope this article can help you.