{"id":2268,"date":"2018-06-16T19:57:28","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T19:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leinss.com\/blog\/?p=2268"},"modified":"2018-06-16T19:57:28","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T19:57:28","slug":"bypassing-choose-privacy-settings-screen-windows-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leinss.com\/blog\/?p=2268","title":{"rendered":"Bypassing Choose Privacy Settings Screen – Windows 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was a fun one to track down.\u00a0 When we did in-place upgrades on Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 1703, we never got this “Choose privacy settings for your device” screen.\u00a0 However, going from 8.1 to 1803, this screen will appear once for the first user who logs in with local administrative rights (even though we define certain privacy settings through GPO):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Trying to track this down was hard, but I was inspired by this post on Reddit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The first stab I tried was logging in as a regular user, running ProcMon and then trying to filter on the registry write operations, but even then, it was too much noise (60K+ events).\u00a0 I then tried another approach.\u00a0 When you click the Accept button, there’s a UAC prompt that comes up with a title of “User settings: OOBE”.\u00a0 I made note of the word “OOBE” and cancelled it making changes. I ran Process Explorer as admin logged in as a regular user, then switched over to logging in as an administrator until I got the privacy screen, switched back to the regular user and then did a search for “OOBE” in the process list.\u00a0 One of the processes that came up was svchost.exe and it had the following key open:<\/p>\n

HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\OOBE\\Stats<\/p>\n

I drilled around in this parent key and found this setting:<\/p>\n

HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\OOBE\\PrivacyConsentStatus<\/p>\n

Ah ha!\u00a0 It was set to REG_DWORD 2, so I set it to 1 and tried logging in again as an administrator.\u00a0 No prompt to set privacy settings!\u00a0 I deleted the whole PrivacyConsentStatus key and the prompt still did not show up.\u00a0 I went back and set PrivacyConsentStatus to 2, logged off and back on, privacy settings page showed back up, I clicked the Accept button on the privacy page and then went back to this registry key to see the results.\u00a0 PrivacyConsentStatus was set back to 1 and a new entry called PrivacyConsentSID was created with a REG_SZ value with my user account SID.\u00a0 I deleted PrivacyConsentSID and it seemed to have no effect on the system.<\/p>\n

The fix is simple: copy the following into a REG file and then fire it towards the end of OSD<\/p>\n

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00<\/pre>\n
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\OOBE]\r\n\"PrivacyConsentStatus\"=dword:00000001<\/pre>\n