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When I reinstalled Windows 10 recently, I was careful to disable all the options for Cortana. I removed it from the taskbar then when into the settings and disabled every permission I could find. I'm using an offline account and I've never logged into Cortana, Office, Skype or any other product with a Microsoft account.

However, I just received a Windows notification that seems to have been triggered by the system reading my web browser. I had just opened up Gmail in Chrome and one of my new emails was a shipment confirmation from Amazon. The Windows notification (within seconds) suggested that I use Cortana to track packages.

Am I missing something or is this an obvious case of software reading my personal information despite being configured to leave me alone?

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  • To narrow down the issue, did the Cortana thing show as gmail received your new email, or was it new, unread, for more than 30 minutes by the time you logged into Gmail on chrome which a few seconds later received the Cortana notification? Also, if on any Microsoft Apps (including pc and phone - apps MADE by Microsoft) have you logged in with your Google Account (Contacts, Calendar, People, Edge, etc)?
    – El8dN8
    Commented Nov 19, 2017 at 9:35
  • It was new, unread, for more than 30 minutes by the time I logged into Gmail on chrome, then a few seconds later received the Cortana notification. The only Microsoft/Google connection that I can think of is that my Gmail address is the backup email address for my Skype account. I can't think of anything that would have access to the content of my mail.
    – carpiediem
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 0:24

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As the old joke goes about Microsoft: "That's not a bug. It's a feature!" https://www.windowscentral.com/outlook-cortana-emails Microsoft has plans (apparently already implemented) to enable Cortana to read and attempt to interpret the content of our emails.

I updated Windows 10 from 1809 to 1903 last weekend and was surprised this morning with a few notifications about content of an email in which I had mentioned shopping using Wunderlist. You can view proof screenshots of the notifications here: http://colly.dyndns.org/cortana/

You can read about this new "feature" here: https://www.windowscentral.com/outlook-cortana-emails

This might turn out to be very useful for both my son and my sister who are losing their vision. At present, I have only been using Alexa (not Cortana) to read my Kindle books. MY Alexa history is a very boring list of repeated "Alexa, pause" and "Alexa, resume" with an occasional "Alexa, read my notifications" when the Echo Dot turns the light ring yellow to let me know we just got a package (from Amazon) delivered.

When I share this new bit of information with our local PC club members, I'm sure they will be interested.

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  • It sounds like a useful feature for the right person. The problem is that I specifically disabled all of the services that should make the feature possible. I also don't use Outlook (which your link refers to) or Windows Mail and I only rarely touch Edge (certainly not when this happened).
    – carpiediem
    Commented Jul 16, 2019 at 11:18

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