Windows Privacy Toolkit — The Update That Changed Everything

June 27, 2026

Notes, ideas, and experiments — a place to ramble about what I’m building and learning.

🔄 Where We Left Off

Back in November, I wrote about the Windows 11 Privacy Toolkit — a PowerShell script that helps users lock down their privacy settings without needing to touch the registry manually.
The plan was to eventually wrap it in a Python desktop app and make it accessible to everyone.

Well — plans change. And honestly? This change was better.

🔗 View the project on GitHub →

🖥️ The GUI Is Here (Just Not the One I Planned)

Instead of a Python frontend, I built the interface directly in PowerShell using WinForms.

The result is a tabbed graphical interface — no terminal required, no extra runtime, no installer dependencies. Just a script that launches a proper window.

Why WinForms over Python?

• No extra dependencies — PowerShell ships with Windows, WinForms is already there
• Direct access to system APIs — no subprocess wrappers or permission gymnastics
• Faster to iterate — I could test and tweak without switching languages
• Single file distribution — one .ps1 file, run as Administrator, done

The interface is built around checkboxes grouped by category, a progress log, and an “Apply Selected” button that creates a restore point before touching anything. Clean, functional, and still totally transparent — you can read every line of what it does.

🔒 New Privacy & Security Features

This update added several settings I’d been meaning to get to:

Windows Recall
Microsoft’s AI-powered screenshot history feature. It’s disabled by default in the toolkit now — it’s the kind of feature most privacy-conscious users will want off immediately.

Cortana & Bing Search
Start menu Bing search integration and Cortana are both toggleable. These have been a friction point for a while, and it felt wrong not to have them in the list.

Suggested Content
Lock screen promotions, suggested apps, and tips — all gone with a single checkbox.

SMBv1
Already in the previous version conceptually, but the GUI label handling was fixed this round. SMBv1 is a well-known attack surface (EternalBlue, WannaCry) and there’s rarely a reason to leave it enabled on a modern system.

Network Protection & Controlled Folder Access
Both now properly surfaced in the UI with accurate labels.

🧪 CI/CD — Because “It Works on My Machine” Isn’t Good Enough

The biggest infrastructure change this update: a GitHub Actions pipeline running on a real Windows runner.

It does two things:

1. PSScriptAnalyzer — PowerShell’s official linter. Catches style issues, deprecated syntax, and common mistakes before they land in main.
2. Pester — PowerShell’s unit testing framework. Tests for the new functions (Windows Recall, Cortana, Bing Search, bloat removal) run automatically on every push.

Setting this up on Windows required a bit of work — the Linux-specific command stubs I’d started with didn’t translate, so I rewrote the workflow to run entirely on windows-latest. It’s a small thing, but having CI catch issues before I push feels like a meaningful step up for a solo project.

🛠️ Under the Hood

A few code quality improvements alongside the new features:

• Consistent function naming — everything follows the same Verb-Noun PowerShell convention now
• CmdletBinding added — to New-RestorePoint, Remove-BloatApp, and other core functions, enabling proper pipeline and -WhatIf support
• Streamlined prompts — the GUI startup flow is cleaner, fewer unnecessary confirmation dialogs

These aren’t glamorous changes, but they make the codebase easier to maintain and extend.

🧠 Lessons from This Round

• Stay in the same ecosystem when you can. WinForms felt like a compromise at first, but it’s been faster and more reliable than bridging to Python would have been.
• CI on the right OS matters. Running PowerShell tests on Linux with stubs was fragile. Running them on Windows is just correct.
• Small UX details matter. A checkbox label with garbled encoding or wrong text erodes trust in a privacy tool more than almost anything else.

🚀 What’s Next

The core feature set is in a solid place. From here I’m looking at:

• Preset profiles — a “Safe” mode for cautious users, an “Aggressive” mode for those who want everything locked down
• Better restore/rollback UI — surfacing the audit log more prominently
• Testing coverage — more Pester tests for the registry-touching functions

If you’re on Windows 11 and want to clean up your privacy settings, give it a try:
👉 https://github.com/willj4945/windows_privacy

As always — thanks for reading.
Stay curious ✨
— Will