Win 10 and OneDrive

So I drank the Green Kool-Aid and upgraded my brand new computer to Win 10 from Win 8 before I did anything else on it. I survived, and quite frankly had very little trouble with Windows ME and Vista, so I figured bring it on.

Everything went pretty smoothly and Win 10 is pretty much as expected. Note that I said "as expected" not good, bad, evil or a saviour.

One thing that did sort of take me back is today I was running around in the computer familiarizing myself with everything and I found the Picture file on OneDrive contained ALL of the pictures from my cell phone.

A few days ago I had downloaded ONE picture from my phone so I could send it to a friend. At no time was I asked, nor did I attempt to download, ALL of the pictures from my phone. While I don't wear a tinfoil hat I do find it a bit disconcerting, plus I am sort of anal about wanting MY computer to do what I ASK it to do WHEN I ask it to do it or at the very least request permission to download something.

So long story longer...I would like to disable OneDrive on my computer for the time being. I did some searching on line and they are showing to untick a box that allows OneDrive to start at startup but I am not able to find that page anywhere on my computer.

Any tips or advice appreciated.
Dave​

 

You can right click the OneDrive icon in your system tray and open Settings. There you can unlink your computer from OneDrive. You could also disable OneDrive in your phone if you want. If you check your OneDrive account online it will contain all your pictures and probably other files too you weren't aware of.

 

Thank you Earthling! System tray...of course...face palm. I tried right clicking every One Drive icon I could find but it never gave me the option to unlink or not start at start up. Never thought of the system tray.

As I mentioned brand new computer, I have not loaded a single thing except Office and I already have 16 items in the system tray.

This may be a painful journey to get everything set up the way I would like it. So much of what I am seeing appears to be "change for the sake of change" with no real substantive operational change at the end of the day.
Dave​

 

Yeah, change for change's sake has been with us through every new Windows version - nothing new there. Your problem arose because OneDrive sync'd all you phone's pics to the MS servers and Win 10 picked them up as soon as you logged in to your MS account. I have no time for all this automatic syncing and have disabled OneDrive on everything other than my main PC. If I want pics or docs on another device I can always get them by signing in online.

 

Well I stand to be corrected on this idea but I have a feeling that over the next few years, once everyone has all their files on Onedrive in the cloud, the next move from Microsoft (and everyone else) will be charging $$ to store and/or access their server.

I want MY files on MY computer and MY backup device(s) tyvm.

It will be an interesting journey learning to use and adapting to Win 10 over the next year or two. I hope it is worth it in the end.
Thanks again for the help.
Dave​

 

Have a look at this program. Maybe it can help to kill Microsoft's theft of private info and files. Bring on the lawsuits...

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/w10privacy.html

 

The question I'd like an answer to is whether you can effectively block all this data from being collected by Microsoft by the simple expedient of logging in to your system with a local account rather than with a Microsoft account. You can still use OneDrive when using a local account but I can't see how MS can collect and identify to you the other data Win 10 collects when you are only identifiable by an internet IP which in most cases changes every session.

Anyone?

 

Interesting question Earthling.
Here's some info.
http://***********.com/information-...ndows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

In place of the asterisks, type a_rstechnica without the underscore.

 

Thanks Eldon. Just leaves me even more uncertain just what MS is gathering. I've got 8.1 available too on this laptop and I'm left wondering whether I should use that or go the whole hog and revert to the original Win 7 and have none of these concerns.

 

Exactly why I continue with Windows 7 (online) and Windows XP (offline).
And here's some more bad news... but not for me.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/are-recent-patches-windows-78-letting-microsoft-spy-you.htm

 

Interesting discussion there. I guess I'm becoming resigned to accepting that if I choose to use Windows and the internet then one way or another they will always get whatever it is they want from me. The only real alternative is to switch to Linux but that, as I get older, gets ever more unlikely. It really rankles though that MS are pushing 'important' updates that in all likelihood are not at all important to me, only to Microsoft.