How to disable Activity history and protect your privacy

6 min. read

Updated onOctober 4, 2023

updated onOctober 4, 2023

Share this article

Improve this guide

Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help Windows Report sustain the editorial teamRead more

Activity history is a new feature introduced in theApril update, and although this feature can be helpful, many users have privacy concerns. This feature can send your information, such as applications you use, as well as documents and websites you view to Microsoft, and many users don’t want that. If you’re one of the users concerned about their privacy, today we’ll show you how to disable Activity history feature on Windows 10.

What is Activity history and how to disable it?

As previously mentioned, Activity history feature was introduced in April update along with Timeline. By using Timeline and Activity history, you can easily see all the documents or web pages that you visited on a certain date and switch back to them with just a single click.

This feature stores all this data locally, but if you want, you can enable synchronization and sync your data with Microsoft’s servers. By doing so, you can sync your activity with other devices and continue working on documents or visit the websites on other devices. Although this sounds quite useful, many users have privacy concerns, so today we’ll show you how to disable activity history on your PC.

Here are some methods that you can use to disable Activity history on your PC:

Solution 1 – Change your settings

According to users, the best and easiest way to disable Activity history is to disable it from the Settings app. This is quite simple, and you can do it by following these steps:

After disabling these options, Windows won’t collect any activity history on your PC. If you still want to use the Timeline feature but you don’t want to share your history with Microsoft, you can useLet Windows collect my activities from this PCoption.

Solution 2 – Change your Group policy

According to users, you can also disable Activity history feature right from Group policy settings. This is quite useful if you’re managing multiple PCs or you simply want to enforce this rule on the entire PC. To disable Activity history, you just need to do the following:

After making these changes, your PC won’t gather activity history and your data won’t be uploaded to Microsoft’s servers.

Solution 3 – Edit your registry

Using a Group Policy Editor to disable Activity history on your PC is a great method, but some versions of Windows don’t have Group Policy Editor available. If you don’t have Group Policy Editor, you can disable this feature fromRegistry Editor. To do that, just follow these steps:

After doing that, restart your PC or simply log out of your account and log back in again. After doing that, the activity history feature will be disabled.

Solution 4 – Clear your activity history

If you’ve already disabled Activity history on your PC, you should know that your data is still stored online on Microsoft’s servers. However, you can fix that easily simply by clearing your history from the Settings app. To do that, follow these steps:

After doing that, your history will be cleared and all your data removed from Microsoft’s servers.

Solution 5 – Clear your history from your Microsoft account

If you’re worried that your information is still available on Microsoft’s servers, you can remove it right from your Microsoft account. This is useful if you don’t have the access to your PC but you want to ensure that your activity history isn’t available online.

To clear your activity history, do the following:

After a couple of moments, your activity history will be removed from Microsoft’s servers.

Activity history can be a useful feature, especially if you want to quickly hop back to a certain project that you were working on earlier. However, if you’re concerned about your privacy, feel free to try some of our solutions and use them to disable activity history on your PC.

How to disable Activity history and protect your privacy#

What is Activity history and how to disable it?#

Solution 1 – Change your settings#

Solution 2 – Change your Group policy#

Solution 3 – Edit your registry#

Solution 4 – Clear your activity history#

Solution 5 – Clear your history from your Microsoft account#