The hunt for Cortana

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I’d like your comments, insights and experiences on disabling Cortana. As best I can tell, all of Windows Search is run through Cortana (which is, its
[See the full post at: The hunt for Cortana]

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This has *got* to be the “Holy Grail” of Windows 10. I hope all the great minds here can find it and bury it somewhere safe, for good.

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Slaying Cortana won’t kill all snooping – but it’ll go a long way.

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Edu + Ent 1607 mercifully Cortana free, Edu 1511 somehow aquires Cortana (supposed to not be included) either by installing cumm. update from Desktop or as simple as connecting to the net during installation. Really not sure how that happened the other week. It can be disabled with GPOL and strangely right clicking on the taskbar to remove the search bar. As for the other versions cant really say having never tried. Seen lots of suggestions with a lot of potential for calamity and all say its still a background process. ch100 will probably know if it can be disabled/removed using Windows sim or disabling/removing the package using DISM before install.(i havent tried) Both the previous methods are way beyond a casual afternoon “tinker” for the average user Interesting to note that Cortana appears to be mentioned in settings even though it is not supposed to be included in the above versions.

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What are the top ten reasons for disabling Cortana?

How to Disable Cortana in Windows 10’s Anniversary Update:
http://www.howtogeek.com/265027/how-to-disable-cortana-in-windows-10/

Why Is Cortana Still Running in the Background After You Disable It?
Cortana Is Really Just “SearchUI.exe”
“SearchUI.exe” Is the Windows Search Feature
SearchUI.exe Barely Uses Any Resources, So Don’t Sweat It
http://www.howtogeek.com/271096/why-is-cortana-still-running-in-the-background-after-you-disable-it/

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Well, one way to avoid it is to set a location and/or input methods of a country where Cortana isn’t available, when installing Windows 10.

I’ve only seen Cortana come up if I leave the locale setting at the default US-English.

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It makes little sense to me. 1511 gave you the option to largely disable it, why take that away in 1607?

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I think the problem with taking off Cortana is that disables Windows Search and breaks other functionality.
The best what can be done is disabling the annoying functionality and leaving only Desktop Search active.
One step in that direction and enhance privacy to some extent is to disable all microphones attached or built in the PC/Notebook. Another one would be to disable the camera from Device Manager and turn it on only when required.

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Also try this, I don’t know if it works for Home and Pro, please someone confirm.

****************************************
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSearch]
“CortanaCapabilities”=”Location”
“CortanaCapabilityFlags”=dword:00000010

****************************************

Please check the original values for your computer to be able to restore the original configuration if needed.

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Yep. The Zuckerberg approach – tape over the camera and some sound absorber over the mike.

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1511 had a one-click “disable” switch, but I’m not convinced it really disabled the more nefarious parts of Cortana.

1607 has no such switch, but a registry change that’ll knock out part of Cortana. But… who knows what else lurks?

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What’s the annoying functionality?

Cortana doesn’t respond to voice unless you click the microphone icon or enable Hey Cortana, which is off by default.

What’s the connection between Cortana and a camera?

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I have never tried to use DISM to remove Cortana offline. I think, which I said in a diffrent post, that Cortana is core functionality and cannot be safely removed entirely. Like IE in Windows 7.
There may be ways to control Cortana via registry keys and I proposed some based on the configuration observed in EDU and assuming that the policies area of the registry would not work for Home Edition.

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Can you be absolutely sure that cortana isn’t uploading everything you say within proximity of the microphone? Samsung were discovered to be doing this with their their smart tvs – https://boingboing.net/2015/02/06/samsung-watch-what-you-say-in.html

And isn’t it interesting that the founder of one of the largest data scrapers on the planet covers his mic and camera with tape, as woody pointed out. Not only that but he bought the homes surrounding his own because, get this, he wanted some privacy.

I do not trust microsoft, google and most especially amazon with their new gadget to honour that setting, physical switch, whatever. There are even recordings online of what people have asked siri. Remember, the future is one where you are always in earshot of a mic and always on camera (voice & facial recognition). I’m not a luddite, i would happily use these things IF, and it’s a big if, the corporations can be trusted with such intimate information of our most private moments. Then there’s the hacking, they’re all hacked eventually and that stuff is out there. Google storing patient records? Dear god, no, absolutely not.

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With these changes there are still two Cortana processes running in Task Manager – Cortana and Cortana Background Task Host.
Didn’t turn it off

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As a matter of fact, it gets changed back to SpeechLanguage and 0x00000200 (512) on reboot

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v1607 14393.351

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May have to deal with ownership

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Samsung weren’t discovered doing anything.

Their EULA said, “If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted … to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.”

Samsung SmartTV eavesdropping flap overblown
http://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-smarttv-eavesdropping-flap-overblown/

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yeah your right ch100 i had a look this afternoon its not visible in a wim/esd we have ADK at work (not here for obvious size reasons and too much like “homework” ) but as you say probably its “untouchable” you maybe able to disable it but “5 gets you 20” first cumm. update and itll spring back in there. It actually does in ver. 1511 Edu installed without. 1607 Edu ver. still has references to Cortana in the settings pages.
While messing around with the wim/esd this morning i had a quick “google” and theres really not many solutions out there for the average user i wouldnt even recommend trying and quite a few all state that the first update win 10 will display its amazing “recuperative propereties” or throw you in to the never ending “boot loop”

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I don’t want all my local search terms being sent to bing and added to my marketing profile there! Now they remove the off swtich?!

What do businesses with confidential information think about this?

Do you want to see ads targeted based on what files/programs you searched for on your local pc on ever microsoft ad affiliate site you visit?

What’s next, they index our documents for marketing words?

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HaHa yeah that used to work for en-gb settings alas “she has jumped the pond” now she works in the London area as well. Interesting point though some win10 versions come with K,N designations K=korea, N=EEC/Europe versions. Korean aint my “forte” and European i never use due to it, i believe, coming without features such as windows media player etc (result of one of those little North America Europe trade spats)

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Does this mean we have to pass notes too each other, Play loud music or run the shower if we wish to converse in front of our Laptops

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Thank you for the details. So it does not work this way. Those keys are the default for EDU Edition, supposedly a customised and more private version of Enterprise. Enterprise can be configured to the same level of privacy like EDU because except for the licensing models they are technically the same, but it is not out of the box.
Then the only solution that may work like in Enterprise versions is the one in the post above from b.
The registry key is the same configuration done by the Group Policy Editor where it is available.

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You’ll notice they’ve removed the offending bit from their privacy policy. But it’s the tip of the iceberg though isn’t it, when you have these corporations beholden to third party advertisers they’re not going to intentionally limit the amount of personal info they can extract from you.

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Such businesses don’t and won’t use Win 10. Microsoft’s “modern” model is simply not right for businesses that want to keep control of their systems.

Maybe some small insurance agency office or similar that doesn’t want to pay for an IT expert would find WaaS attractive, I don’t know. But for a technically capable organization that doesn’t care to share it’s company secrets with whatever cloud servers Windows wants to contact today… Uh uh.

Of course staying in “limbo” with an older OS will not keep forever, and it’s ESPECIALLY worrisome that Microsoft seems to be trying to push their “modern” ideas into the older systems via Win Update.

-Noel

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I know it isn’t for the average user, but I’m still using the nuclear option on Cortana. I take ownership of it’s folder in C:WindowsSystemApps and eradicate it.

The only adverse effects I’ve noticed is that the built-in search no longer works but Classic Shell (or other start menu replacements)have their own built-in search.

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Does Cortana appear in the Task Manager?

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This is my first time commenting on this site, but I’ve been a lurker for a long time (mainly by recomendation of Noel Carboni from msfn), and I have some info on Cortana, that I think still hasn’t been disclosed.
If you have Windows 10 TH1 and TH2, you can remove Cortana as you please (removing the system files, using install_wim_tweak, …), because Windows 8’s Search Anywhere sidebar is still present in the system files. With RS1 they removed it, unfortunatly. All you need to do to call it, is just run this simple rundll32 command:
rundll32.exe -sta {C90FB8CA-3295-4462-A721-2935E83694BA}
It works like a charm, doesn’t need to run in the background, and is non intrusive!

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No, Cortana is not in task manager using this method. It is completely dead so far as I can tell.

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Sorry, but that’s just plain wrong.

The large and technically capable corporation where I recently worked for a year has already transitioned about 30% of its 100,000+ staff from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10, and all will have been migrated within the next two years.

Their version of Windows 10 Pro has Cortana (but not search) disabled, and signing into Windows with a Microsoft account is also blocked.

And LTSB (without Cortana) is specifically designed for business production machines, so you over-generalize about Windows 10.

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This is the same result I sent to you a while back when I was “chasing Cortana.” The two processes do not show up in Task Manager using Classic Shell for search after you block (I renamed) the SystemApps folder related to Cortana. What is used is Windows Indexing process. The search in the Taskbar no longer works.

There is also another similar folder under C:Users\AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsApplication Shortcuts. I think I killed that one too.

FYI There are also Edge related folders in both places.

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Samsung have apparently added data collection to their latest version (4.9.7) of their Magician program for solid state drives.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4o3e8b/psa_samsung_magician_allows_your_ssd_to_be/

According to that thread, you can opt out during the install but you can’t update the SSD’s firmware if you choose to do that.

Seems like its a ‘race to the bottom’ these days with most of these large companies – “everyone else does it so why can’t we?”

I use the latest version of Samsung Magician but the data collection doesn’t bother me since I no longer go online with Windows 7.

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So what do you think? Is it advisable for normal Win10 users to kill Cortana, if they replace “her” with Classic Shell?

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But what of RS1 (1607 to the uninitiated)?

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Yes, by RS1 I mean 1607, just like with TH1 I mean 1507 and TH2 1511.

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Has anyone else tried the script that is available on the WinAero web site? I am running Win 10 Pro 1511. I ran a Macrium image before running the script (just in case), ran the script, and I don’t see Cortana in Task Manager.

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Noel, the technically capable organizations which you mentioned do want to share their data in the Cloud, as long as all paperwork is in order, i.e the Cloud providers are certified at the right levels.
Good or bad, ‘Times are a changin’

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You should not use Windows 10.

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Absolutely not.

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The testing I did was with Cortana was with 1607 around Aug 22. I did not continue to use Win10 on a day-to-day basis to see if there were any other implications after I blocked the folders. I know that was the only way I found to eliminate the two processes in the Task Manager.

None of this is for “normal Win10 users.” The people who come to this site are technically aware. They are in the minority.
The “normal” user doesn’t even know file structure, has no idea about taking ownership, just accepts Cortana as part of Win10, and is only aware of the snooping b/c they read about it here and there. Most have Home editions – for the most part the only edition sold in stores. Group Policy (not in Home) and Registry hacking are not in their bag of tricks. For them, Win10 is Win10 (unfortunately with all the MS settings turned ON by default).

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I’m pretty sure the folders will be replaced with updates. So this will be an uphill battle.

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So I did some testing in a VM and all you need to do is go to “Region” and change the setting to a place without Cortana (try some small less known country).
All the time and currency formats and keyboard can stay (for example, US-English).

After a restart, no more Cortana process in Task Manager.

(This is on W10 Pro, by the way.)

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Drat. That’s put me right off getting one of their SSDs, always seen them recommended by people.

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Now THAT is an innovative, easy solution. Thanks!

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What do you think of the idea to switch to an English-speaking country that isn’t on the Cortana list? (Can’t think of one offhand, but there must be one.)

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OIC. This is the magic incantation, then, that removes Cortana. Do you still have native search capability? If so, how do you access it?

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I’m going to write a guide, so this becomes clear as water. First, this only works on Windows 10 1507 and 1511 (that is TH1 10256 and TH2 10586). As of Windows 10 Anniversary Update 1607 (RS1 14393) Microsoft removed the old search capabilities. Now there are 2 ways to do this.
You can either remove Cortana and create the shortcut for Windows 8’s Search fly out, or keep Cortana alongside the shortcut for Windows 8’s search everywhere.
The best way to remove Cortana, is by using install_wim_tweak, a powerful tool that allows the removal of hidden Windows packages (download it from this link:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152688-win6x_registry_tweak/
Basically run these commands on Command Prompt, opened where you have install_wim_tweak.exe extracted:
install_wim_tweak.exe /o /c Microsoft-OneCore-CortanaComponents /r
install_wim_tweak.exe /o /c Microsoft-Windows-Search2 /r
After this, Cortana won’t be running on the background, and you can hide the search icon on the taskbar. The advantage of doing things by this method, is that sfc /scannow command won’t give any integrity errors.
Now right click on an empty space on the Desktop, go to new and click shortcut. On the location field, paste this:
%windir%system32rundll32.exe -sta {C90FB8CA-3295-4462-A721-2935E83694BA}
And then, give it a name, like “Search” (simple, right?). And there you have it. You can invoke the Windows 8 search fly out by running this shortcut. You can pin it on the taskbar, if that’s easier for you. Do note that writing on the start menu won’t immediately call for the search function if you removed Cortana. You’ll have to run the shortcut each time.
Hope this guide helps people on older Windows 10 releases to kill the Jabberwock

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Only way I found to turn it off is to say No to all the privacy questions up front. Then it tells you Cortana can’t run unless you give it the power of the gods.

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What effect does this have on any DVDs you might play?

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Yep, but even then, it doesn’t get turned off.

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I did. Worked fine.

The only leftover are some errors in the events log about attempts to activate it that fail.

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What’s the point of using Windows 10 and performing this procedure? Can’t you just use Windows 8.1 instead?

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What’s the point of using Windows 10 and performing this procedure? Can’t you just use Windows 8.1 instead?

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As long as all paperwork is in order?

I ran a railroad and would not have wanted our computers sharing data with anyone unless we could see some advantage to it. As in, what’s in it for us?

The idea that businesses will fall in line needs justification, I think.

The reason that comes closest to such justification is that the hardware wears out and becomes otherwise obsolete, and the replacement hardware only comes with Windows 10. That one bears watching. Along with the related questions of how many businesses sign up for enterprise versions that give them back some control, and how many flee to another OS.

Were I still at the railroad, we would have loaded up on Win 7 machines during the last year.

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That would be the preferred choice

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I don’t have 10, but you may want to try Belize, it is the only Latin American country to speak English.

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Yes, ch100 has definitely put his finger on it.

There’s just nothing that is attractive about Win 10 outside the new “features”. Right now, virtually ALL the changes are such that we want to be able to disable them! We want to use Windows OUR WAY.

Then, as time goes on, we want to be able to dabble with various new features. Perhaps Cortana will be made less intrusive while working better. Maybe cloud-integration will be distilled down to something useful where private information isn’t being stripped from users and sold. Could be that telemetry will be proven to be beneficial enough to warrant sharing limited usage data.

The point is, an “all or nothing NOW” approach just isn’t acceptable to those who know what they’re doing. This is an OS that’s been giving us rich compatibility and configurability for DECADES. Now control is just being yanked away.

-Noel

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Just deleting files leaves you with a system that logs regular errors. I for one don’t find that acceptable. The system needs to be able to run clean.

-Noel

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People run companies, and many – even those running big ones – have no earthly idea about the technical ramifications of their decisions. Don’t kid yourself; much of what’s being taken as givens in discussions here would be news to them. And if a decision should lead to a diminished business capability or more expensive TCO, oh well, they’ll change jobs.

Do NOT respect a big company because of its size. Big companies are run as stupidly as any.

Think about the disbelief you felt when the first previews of Windows 10 showed up (or 8 before that). Now imagine corporate disbelief at that level, just happening NOW. Imagine IT decision-makers just coming to think about how Windows 10 is different than their beloved 7 (or XP). Why? They have been too wrapped up in operations to think ahead. Mostly their decisions have to be forced.

Times don’t have to change for the worse just because some predatory company says they should, and pays a lot to market that idea. Maybe times should make SENSE instead.

What if Microsoft held a “Windows 10 release” and no one showed up? Maybe they’d actually have to add some value to stay in business. THAT would be healthy.

The word is already out. Look at the stats. Windows 10 adoption is FLAT. For months now. It is no longer on the rise because given the cost it tries to extract from each user, many find it just not worth using.

Remember when people actually paid for Windows?

-Noel

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You make a good point. If we could TRUST Microsoft – something they’ve been failing to give us reasons to do for some 3 or 4 years now – then the landscape could be different.

What if every telemetry operation wrote an entry to a log that showed EXACTLY what was being reported?

What if every new / flaky / seemingly predatory feature was actually made configurable, so that users could choose to opt out until they gained confidence.

There’s nothing new about that. It’s the way it was. And it cost Microsoft money to support, but it also paid off in their having become the largest OS maker.

We’ve moved past that golden age. Why? Because people allow it to happen?

No, “times do not have to change” for the sake of change itself. The change needs to be positive – or just not accepted.

-Noel

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To me, I don’t think using an older build is a solution to the problem, as it is at best temporary unless you plan on not patching your system and staying on 1511 forever.

The problem I had trying to find a replacement to Cortana or the basic Windows 10 search that seems to work less well than the previous ones is I didn’t easily find something that is as good as the not-that-great-but-ok-when-it-works Windows 7 search tool.

Did anybody find something free, that indexes content so you can look up sentences you typed in words documents and that also indexes all the settings panels and the actions you can click on like “create a system image”? The software I have found during the little time spent searching lacked in one way or another.

Simple need : just easily find the Windows features buried everywhere, distinguish between new and old control panel settings, index the content in the files you want and do it while the system is idle, all that in a free lightweight package.

Oh, and also a tool that doesn’t have problems with foreign languages. It needs to treat é, è, ê all as e in French. Funny anecdote, I reported a bug in Windows 8 (original) to Microsoft where “options d’indexation” wasn’t found because the apostrophe they looked for was not exactly curved the same way as the apostrophe in the French keyboard. Guess what, it was fixed but when Windows 10 came out, the bug was back and I had to tell them again!

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By the way, I ran across a panel in the “WinAero Tweaker” tool that promises a one click fix to block Cortana…

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/14393/WATCortana.png

I don’t personally know how effective it is or whether it blocks SearchUI from running, because I had already expunged Cortana before trying the tool. It offers a lot of other nice tweaks too.

-Noel

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I tremble in fear….

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I have a Samsung 850 EVO SSD in my NUC PC, and have no knowledge of any included software for managing the SSD. Magician does not seem to be necessary for managing Samsung SSDs. I did the formatting and setup with normal tools like gParted or MiniTools, and all went perfectly well. Windows Installer worked perfectly. I let Windows 10 Pro do the maintenance and the SSD housekeeping.

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My primary reason for installing O&O ShutUp 10 was to gain control over privacy controls, including most of what Coratana does, in one control panel screen. As far as I know, ShutUp 10 does not remove Cortana, but disables all the telemetry and target ads crapware for which Cortana and Bing Search are notorious around here.

Personally, I don’t care if there remains some residual core from Cortana. Without ad preferences and without most Win 10 telemetry enabled, how is anything going to be uploaded to Microsoft or their partners? And if a little bit of stuff does trickle up, is this personally identifiable at all?

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I used it and its fine. Used one to get rid of edge too.

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http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/688721/dod-wide-windows-10-rapid-deployment-to-boost-cybersecurity
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/02/17/us-department-of-defense-commits-to-upgrade-4-million-seats-to-windows-10/#Re6zvyhDbMCseITp.97
http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/windows-10-dod/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/department-of-defense-standardizes-on-windows-10-certifies-surfaces/

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You could try changing the Regional Settings, but this has implications, not visible immediately sometimes.
For example, Microsoft’s recommendation for Australia starting with Windows 8/2012 is not to use US English as display language, but UK English, this being the official language, although both are used de facto. The assumption is that words like Favorites or Center in the menus or Control Panel would display as Favourites or Centre.
One of the main problems which I found when trying, was that the keyboard would sometimes switch to the British Version with the GBP symbol on it and this was happening on the system account, used before logging in. Some people use symbols like @ or $ in the password which on the UK Keyboard are placed differently or do not exist at all and this would not allow the same people to log in. See how subtle the language and regional issues could be sometimes?
There is another issue with Remote Desktop (and Citrix) switching to the default language associated with the configured keyboard without a very little known registry configuration which works in Windows 10, although there was a time when it was not working in XP/2003 but it was corrected.
http://superuser.com/questions/426356/how-can-i-stop-the-remote-computer-from-changing-my-keyboard-layout
It works like this. The normal settings for Australia are to use Australian Regional Settings and Australian Locales and the US Keyboard (we use dollar as currency and don’t have specific keyboard layout). With Remote Desktop without the registry config, the language switches to US because of the association with the keyboard and this changes the Spell Checker’s behaviour.
PKCano mentioned the DVD Player behaviour which is locked to certain regions.
See how changing the language affects a lot of other things?

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@PKCano
Unfortunately some of us tend to forget the core audience of this blog which is mainly “for Dummies”. I am guilty of this too.
Non-conventional solutions like changing the language or using third-party utilities may work for someone who immediately understands the implications and can rollback if needed and try something else next, but not for the majority of the readers here.

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Certainly true +1

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There is some hope that all or most of what you mentioned will be fine-tuned once they collect enough data from us, their current beta testers.
See how the major release 1607 has not made it to CBB yet and while it has 2 LTSB versions released (including the Server), this is still omitted from the official announcement?
Because there are basic business related issues not resolved, like updating CUs from WSUS still not working for an unknown reason. Same updates installed from WU or manually downloaded from the catalog and installed work, which makes me think that there is something as simple as the files pushed to WSUS are missing the last bit or something like that.
CB users are treated like beta testers, while the InsiderPreview users are the alpha testers.

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Oy. Seems like Cortana won’t die gracefully…..

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But also see

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/score-microsoft-defense-department-windows/

One guess how well that went.

DOD isn’t a monolith.

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I did too. I’ve been trying to post about it for days!

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I’m not going to deprecate the DOD example, though as Woody’s article from 2013 shows, a Microsoft press release is not necessarily a reliable prediction about the future. IMO, though, targeting big organizations was how M$ conquered the market for office productivity software, displacing Lotus, which in some respects had at least one better product at the time. Microsoft knows this tactic by heart.

That does not mean that millions of smaller organizations, especially small business, are going to slavishly follow whatever our federal government decides to do.

The hardware trap is a better argument.

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And that little comment worked. Interesting!

I tried the WinAero script quite a while ago, and it worked for me. This was probably the first few months of 2016, so it was not a current build… but it worked fine, no BSODs or other such things. I’d also purged MS Store, Edge, etc., and everything else “app” I could. I was already using Classic Start, so I never noticed the issue WinAero mentions with the start menu.

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There are further complications with that approach as there is a default language for the system and language settings for the user (profile).

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