How to Change Windows 10 App Permissions

As I’m sure most of you will have already seen first-hand, the Windows 10 system does not stop growing. For this, over time, it adds new functions and applications to meet our needs. But at the same time it is important that we take care of our privacy in this regard. Thus, we must take a look at the permissions of Windows 10 applications and customize what we need, let’s see how.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the operating system itself includes a good number of programs and input features. It is not for nothing that we are talking about the most widely used desktop system in the world, so its complexity is increasing. With all this, what those from Redmond really achieve is to offer us greater versatility in the day-to-day use of the computer, and comfort in its use. But as we know, more in these times, functionality in technology is not everything.

Change Windows 10 App Permissions

At the same time, we must take into consideration many other extremely important factors. Among these we find the security and privacy of our personal data, or types of use of the PC. And is that Microsoft itself sometimes does not make things too easy for us in this regard.

How to improve the privacy of Windows 10

First of all, a term that you should keep in mind, or at least know, when working with Windows 10 , is telemetry. To give us an idea of what we are talking about here, it is about the automatic collection of user data that the system does. These are sent, anonymously, to Microsoft. The software company claims that this is done with the healthy purpose of knowing the habits of users, and improving their software. But of course, this is something that most do not like, as you can imagine.

Therefore, although we cannot natively eliminate this telemetry entirely, we can minimize its operation. In this way, what we actually achieve is to improve our privacy when working in Windows 10. To achieve this, we just have to open the Settings application through the Win + I key combination. In the new window that appears on the screen, in this case we go to the Privacy section and click on Comments and diagnostics on the right panel.

Comentarios y diagnósticos windows

Here it is enough that we mark the option of Diagnostic data required, the place of Optional diagnostic data. In this way we manage to minimize as much as possible, the data sent to the software giant.

How to change application permissions in Windows

As we mentioned before, Windows 10 is an operating system full of applications and functions that are pre-installed. In order for all of this to work in the most effective way possible, they make use of certain elements that could directly affect our privacy on a day-to-day basis with the PC. Therefore, below we are going to teach you how to manage those permissions that Windows applications make use of and thus increase the privacy of your PC.

And is that some applications and even games from Microsoft, have been designed to take advantage of the specific hardware and software functions of the PC. With this, what we want to tell you is that it is possible that a photo application needs to use the camera of the equipment or the location where we are. It is true that this can be very useful in certain cases, but it is important that we control it, as we are going to see.

How to access and view application permissions

Well, for all this that we tell you, again we will use the Settings application that we discussed before. When it appears, we also click on the Privacy option, although now to customize which applications can use a certain feature of the equipment. Therefore we just have to take a look at the right panel of this section, and scroll down.

In this way, a little further down in this panel that we comment on, we find a section called Application permissions, which is the one that interests us.

Permisos de la aplicación

Below it is where the applications of the operating system that we are looking for to customize their permissions are listed. In this way we will have the possibility, one by one, to manage the elements to which each one will have access and thus improve the privacy of the operating system.

Customize Windows app permissions

It is worth mentioning that in this section that we comment on, we find elements of the importance of our location, the microphone or the webcam. We must also monitor the permissions related to Mail , Calendar , Contacts, etc. Depending on the habitual use that we make of the PC and its operating system, we will have to customize the permissions of an element or application.

To achieve this that we tell you, the first thing we recommend is to take a careful look at the hardware elements and applications that we find here. To modify the permissions of any of them, we only have to click on it in the same right panel of the window. As we see first-hand as we access these elements, it is the possibility of directly not allowing programs to access that element.

Configurar permisos

But that is not all we can do in this regard. We tell you this because at the same time, instead of allowing or blocking access to that particular component, we can filter the applications that will be able to do so. We can achieve this by going down a bit in that same window, in the left panel.

Personalizar permisos independientes

In this way, depending on the programs installed on the PC, and the selected component, the applications that could use it will appear. This does not give the possibility of activating or deactivating the access permission of each program independently of the webcam , location, microphone , etc. Therefore, depending on our usage needs, we can make Windows a more private and secure system.