(Guide/Review) Spydish: quickly check Windows 10 Group Policy privacy settings

[Karlston]

Spydish: quickly check Windows 10 Group Policy privacy settings

Spydish is a tiny program for Windows 10 by the developer of Debotnet and SharpApp designed to provide a quick overview of important Group Policy privacy settings.

 

The privacy tool has been released as a beta by its developer. Interested users may download the latest version of the application from the developer's GitHub project site. It is a 35 Kilobyte zip archive that you need to unpack once it has been downloaded to the local system. You may run it from any location without installation. Note that it requires administrative privileges.

Spydish

 

The main idea behind Spydish is simple: check if privacy related policies are set on the Windows 10 system it is run on. The program displays a list of privacy related policies in a sidebar on the left. You may select all or some of the policies for checking, and hit the analyze button to check the status of each selected policies.

 

Policies are grouped, and each group can be selected individually in the sidebar. A quick check of the supported policies confirms that major privacy policies are supported by the application; this includes support for policies such as "Enable Telemetry", "Block automatic installation of apps", "Disable Bing in Windows Search", or "Disable Windows Defender".

 

A click or tap on the analyze button checks each policy and returns its setting. Spydish color codes results and displays a status for each policies, e.g. not configured or configured, as well.

 

The application supports two additional features: revert policies and apply policies.

 

Revert policies changes the status of all selected policies to the default status (which usually is not configured". Apply policies on the other hand enables the selected policies when selected. Both options are quite useful.

 

Administrators may use the application to get a quick rundown of privacy settings on a Windows 10 machine. Additionally, it is useful to restore policies to defaults or to enable certain private policies on a device. The latter may be of special interest on Home systems of Windows 10 as the Group Policy is not available on these systems (but policies may still be set using the Registry). The app may provide a quicker way of doing so.

 

Compatibility information is not provided on the developer site or on GitHub. The program displays 1903 in the interface (on a Windows 10 version 1909 system). Since it is beta, it is advised to create backups before you use the program to make changes to the system.

 

Tip: check out our overview of Windows 10 privacy tools here.

 

Landing Page: https://github.com/mirinsoft/spydish

 

 

Spydish: quickly check Windows 10 Group Policy privacy settings

 

[ghost]

At a quick glance it doesn't seem to be as complete as O&O ShutUp10.