We're living in the age of 'minimum uninstall requirements'
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Makes you wonder how much (personal) data Microslop Copilot is collecting. If they don't allow uninstalling from cheaper versions, does it mean they need the revenue from data collection?
That’s absolutely what they need. They’re desperately trying to keep the data for themselves instead of sharing it with bloatware vendors.
Hi, actual Windows System Engineer here. Both the "Microsoft Copilot" and the "Microsoft Copilot 365"(previously Office Hub) apps have been removable by group policy or Intune configuration policy since mid last year. Previous to that they were also still able to be remove by running the Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage as a start up script, or remediation script. Fun fact, a lot of those "Debloater" acripts are running this command because the massive amount of engineering work done since Windows 7 to make Windows Components modular.
This is a non article.
Thing is, having to run a startup script to "remove" it means it's not being removed. It's being hindered at each boot.
Fighting against copilot has been a struggle as Microsoft consistently tries to inject it into every single application they can during updates.
We deal with very restrictive international regulations and the fact that they have not simple made a "fuck off" check box is going to get them into a boiling pot once the data they are scraping after ever update that reactively needs to be remediated gets added to their stupid "ai" and is able to be accessed.
Microsoft needs to get their shit together and provide and opt-in during OS install (corporate or not). A large banner should be displayed over the whole screen for 10 seconds "MICROSOFT IS TAKING ALL OF YOUR DATA AND SHOVING IT INTO A DATABASE THAT CAN POTENTIALLY BE ACCESSED BY ANYONE, AND THIS INCLUDES INFORMATION RESTRICTED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AND ANY PERSONALLY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION YOU HAVE ON YOUR COMPUTER" so that and users know that they are being sold and not an owner of what they are paying for.
It does not need to run at every startup, it just needs to run once.
AppXProvisioned packages are those into the system that which are available to install to each new user. I've just suggested "an option" which would be running it as a start up script the first time you provision the machine. I think it's a much better option to use policy.
Updatss to both Copilot applications are performed based on the state of the appxpaclage.
I think thousands of mouse clicks, error messages and browsing history of tens of millions of hundreds of millions of people is a lot harder to use maliciously than people think.
You can see the starting points of the agentic OS, which will serve the vast majority of people. But it is frustrating to see how slow "do this task" prompts are going to progress just because there's not a lot of good sources for prompts. Apart from asking people wheat prompt they would use and then asking for feedback of what should have happened.
I think thousands of mouse clicks, error messages and browsing history of tens of millions of hundreds of millions of people is a lot harder to use maliciously than people think.
I don't care how hard it is to use. THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Coding is hard and telemetry is a good way to solve problems. I don't know how you work on something as complex as an operating system without it.
"My job would be harder if I didn't spy on you" isn't the rebuttal you think it is.
"spying on you" sounds scary... Until you actually think about the person at the other end. A development team tracking a race condition. A mix of people from around the world doing text tagging on screenshots or transcribing voice recordings.
"Your operating system is spying on you" becomes just a dog whistle for "I'm the main character" types because it immediately fails when you start thinking about how it would have to work.
"But they have all this person information on me and they keep trying to sign me up to OneDrive! Any government could just bribe them and get access to it all!" Yes, and then need to recruit and employ thousands of government workers to sift through it looking for dissidence.
Far cheaper and much easier to go through already state owned information or bribe ISPs or just do what's always worked and.. Make stuff up.
The only real value to this information is trying to work out why the latest cumulative update has introduced a printing bug. Nearly all apps ask for you to turn this on and it's not so they can get your browsing habits, it's so they don't have to respond to thousands of angry forum messages that something is not working and then guide every single one of them through the same 10 steps to collect log files and ask about what they were doing and their environment.
You forgot to don your cape this morning, mate.
Edit. Lol I give a genuine complement and someone downvotes. People are strange.
However, the device to which this is applied must meet the following criteria: it must have both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot installed on the system; the Microsoft Copilot app wasn’t installed by the user; and the Microsoft Copilot app wasn’t launched in the past 28 days. This means that even though admins can now remove the Microsoft Copilot app, users would still have the Microsoft 365 Copilot app installed on their system. The former is the free app preinstalled on Windows 11, while the latter is a paid service included with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
It's still quite a long way from "if you don't like Copilot, just uninstall it." They'll let you install one Copilot app if you have another Copilot app installed, leaving you with one Copilot app.
Which Copilot do you get to block?
- The software formerly known as Cortana?
- The software formally known as Office?
- The software formerly known as Bing?
- The software that lets you make silly pictures of yourself as anime characters?
I’m honestly surprised Microsoft hasn’t renamed windows “Copilot” at this point.
https://news-usa.today/hey-copilot-cortana-replaced-in-windows-11-pcworld/
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/copilot-search-announcement-2025
You always could if you know how to use power shell, or just a debloat program like geek uninstaller.
A good start for sure.