- Fine Print for This Article
- What Is WindowsMedia.com?
- What Can You Do To Manage Your Privacy?
- Conclusion
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What Can You Do To Manage Your Privacy?
You may have strong feelings about sharing your personal data with so many people when using Windows Media Player. There's no "one size fits all" solution to prevent software privacy violations, but you can at least customize your privacy settings in Windows Media Player:
Start Windows Media Player.
Choose Tools, Options, and click the Privacy tab in the Options dialog box.
Deselect all the check boxes on the Privacy tab, as shown in Figure 2. (This screen shot is from Windows Media Player 9.0.)
Click the Clear History and Clear CD/DVD buttons to clear the history.
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Figure
2You can also customize the cookies settings in Internet Explorer. For instance, you can specify which web sites are always (or never allowed) to use cookies, regardless of their privacy policy. You can also configure the settings to accept, block, or prompt for first-party and third-party cookies. These settings are configured on the Privacy tab, as shown in Figure 3. On the Security tab, make sure that the two script options are deselected, as shown in Figure 4.
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Figure
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4On the Player tab, there's no way to disable Automatic Updates in Windows Media Player, at least not in the GUI. You must choose between updating once a day, once a week, or once a month. I also like to make sure that the setting Start Player in Media Guide is turned off, as shown in Figure 5. Some people like to leave the option Download Codecs Automatically checked because, according to Microsoft, only supported codecs are downloaded automatically. You're always prompted before a third-party codec is downloaded.
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Figure
5You'll find Windows Media Player registry settings at this location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer
Most of the configuration settings are in the Preferences folder.