Killing Cortana

Cortana, Microsoft's supremely useful digital assistant, is a highlight Windows 10 feature—but not everyone will appreciate the amount of personal information she demands to be helpful.

Cortana, Microsoft’s smart, snarky digital assistant, is one of the highlight features of Windows 10, imbuing the operating system with a sense of presence that never existed in previous versions of Windows. Cortana’s natural language search capabilities rock, and her intelligent surfacing of news and notifications that matter to you help to tailor Windows 10 to suit your specific needs. I’m in love already. But not everyone will take kindly to Cortana. Cortana’s usefulness stems from her connectedness. The assistant taps Bing for web searches and Microsoft’s machine learning in the cloud to deliver those awesome personalization features. The more Cortana knows about you, your location, your friends, and your calendar and email, the better she’s able to provide a personally tailored experience. But all that data you’re shoveling at Cortana travels straight through Microsoft. Fortunately, Microsoft provides you with tools to disable Cortana and erase your footprint in its servers if you’re so inclined. (And Microsoft deserve props for doing so!) Here’s how.

How to disable Cortana in Windows 10

Microsoft actually makes the process pretty simple.

Open Cortana, click the Notebook icon in its left-hand options pane, then select Settingsfrom the list. A bunch of options will appear. You’ll want to slide “Cortana can give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts and more” to off, which disables the assistant on the PC and removes all locally stored data she knows about you.