As the title says I'm confused about what these dozens of windows components actually do online and how I should assess each one. There's virtually nothing on the forums or the internet about them, especially with regard to VPN privacy, so how do you deal with them? To put this question in context. Privacy is essentially a trade-off between convenience and security - I want my system to be secure but not at the expense of much slower connections or to ruin my interaction with the internet. I don't need the highest level of privacy but I do like to understand what I'm letting through and what I'm not. Like most applications some Windows components can be blocked (eg OneDrive) and cause no problems, but some will stop Windows working altogether while others seem to be okay but cause problems in the background. If you let one through why not let them all through? It's a minefield. To put this question another way, what's the point of a VPN if Microsoft can uniquely identify your system and is being told a thousand times a day what it's doing. Unless I've got it all wrong?