thanks

If you’re already on a Linux-based operating system, and you gotta run a real instance of Windows for some reason, your safest bet from both a security and privacy standpoint is to run it in a virtual machine (I like VirtualBox, personally, but VMWare, or whatever else will do the job fine also) and firewall the hell out of it. In a virtual machine, you can totally lock it down as much or as little as you need for the task at hand, and ain’t a damned thing Windows itself can really do about it, and as an added bonus, it saves you from the required reboots of dual-booting. It’s confined to a “safe space” (until you start opening enabling network stuff and opening ports to it). You’re in control.

edit: or QEMU/KVM (with virt-manager)

Really you’d have to fire up Wireshark and see what telemetry Windows was blabbing away behind your back. Analysing those logs can be a tedious business, especially as you’d need a large dataset.

Thing with just about any tech related question posted is likely some geek will have done the heavy lifting for you already. Here is a nice start:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-and-telemetry-time-for-a-simple-network-analysis/

Here is another one:

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/windows-10-data/

That’s logs required to be collected, doesn’t say whether or not the data is sent back to Windows. Best assume yes.

Course, all that proprietary software will have a voluminous licence agreement that nobody reads. They’ll collect as much data as they can to “maximise user experience” or whatever rubbish.

Pro is a little bit better because of features like Bitlocker. A lot better would be Education/Enterprise variant. You’d need special licenses for running enterprise I think. There are also registry hacks that would give you some protection against telemetry (I personally haven’t done this).

Privacy-wise though, any “windows” is going to fare lower than linux is what I’d say. Wait for others in the sub for more insights.