1. Spyware started with XP and was greatly improved in Win7. If you are asking this only now, then Microsoft and everyone else already knows everything there is

1. Spyware started with XP and was greatly improved in Win7. If you are asking this only now, then Microsoft and everyone else already knows everything there is to know about you. 2. When a company tells you that their product protects your privacy, what they mean is that they will try to be the only ones that have personal data about you (and that private data about you can only be bought from them). NOT that you will have any privacy. ---- How you go forward? Best way is to stop using the internet. Go live in a cabin in the woods. (I'm only half joking.) If you live in Europe you can ask for your account and data to be deleted, but that doesn't affect the companies that your data was sold to, nor anon / aggregate statistics your data is part of. To have privacy about what you do/think/like in the future, you can try Linux, but you're not safe even there. Firefox will track your internet activity (can be disabled) and there is spyware such as Ubuntu's popularity-contest package that monitors and reports what you run on your Linux machine. If you want to keep using Windows, the best way would be to wipe your HDD, install clean, activate it, update it (or not), and then cut the direct internet connection. From then on, use a whitelist filtering proxy as the only possible internet access. No DHCP or any usable gateway. I'm using this and is a pain to manage. I have to manually add to the whitelist every new site I want to visit (it gets easier after a while). Another way to do it is to have an non-filtering but password-protected proxy, and don't tell Windows about it. Firefox can use a proxy that is different than Windows' proxy setting. This way you can navigate the web without allowing Windows access to the internet.