Updated: August 29, 2025
Let me explain the fourth law of thermodynamics to you. Now, you could say, Dedo, there ain't one. Yes, there is. It goes as follows: if a description of an entity, intended to explain what an entity does, makes one's understanding of the intended functionality even more cryptic, then such an entity should be immediately discarded as pure garbage. Indeed, we don't want to mess with entropy. Case in point: Connected Devices Platform.
Rummaging about in Windows 10/11, I stumbled upon a service called the above. CDP, in short. What does it do? Ah. Ah! Well, I read the service explanation, I felt my eyelids flutter, and I said, okay, I don't want this. Apparently, this thing goes hand in hand with"user activities" so there's that, too. Confused? You should be. But let me explain, and show you what you can do.
Activities, so many activities!
The biggest fetish of any major company is data. The more they have the more excited they become. Microsoft, like the giant they are, feels compelled to profile their users. How do they do this? There be many ways. One of them is via Activity history. For example, in Windows 10:
The text above reads:
Jump back into what you were doing on your device by storing your activity history, including info about websites you browse and how you use apps and services.
LOLZUR, what.
- I know what I'm doing.
- Info about websites? That's called browser history. Brow-ser his-tory.
- How I use apps and services? I know what I'm doing, I'm not suffering from amnesia.
But this is juicy data. And of course, look at that "Privacy Statement" thingie! Why would Microsoft need to know these things? If the data is stored on the "device", then there's no reason for anyone to know anything, is there? Pure marketing nonsense.
So, apparently, if you use a Microsoft account (another reason not to), this data will be synced, so you can see what you were "doing on your device". No, sorry, you can "jump back in". The fact the Plasma desktop can do all these things and more, without saving any personal data, is just something for you to keep in the back of your mind.
Now, the service responsible for making you "connected" is called Connected Devices Platform (CDP). It has two components. The system one and the per-use one. Because each user is its own trove of pointless data, and we must take care of it separately.
If you use a local account, you're not in the game, right? Well, wrong!
Check your CDP folder
Go to C:\Users\[Your username]\AppData\Local\ConnectedDevicesPlatform.
Here, you will notice all sorts of log files. In particular, for your local user, there's L.[Your username]:
Inside, more database log files. And, observe carefully, the timestamp will change with your usage. In other words, as you use your system(s), even if you have your local user, even if you disable/disallow activity history, even if you configure Activity group policies in the Pro edition, CDP will still run and do something. What's inside these files? No idea, and I don't care. There should be nothing.
The group policies, by the way - Administrative Templates > System > OS Policies:
And so, for me, the only solution is to stop the CDP services.
Disable CDP services
Two shall be the number of the services, and the number of the services shall be two.
- CDPSvc
- CDPUserSvc_somecomboflettersandnumbers
The first can be disabled "normally" via Services.msc. The per-user one will throw an error: Parameter is incorrect. Luckily, I've talked about this problem, too, and you have a guide on how to manually disable the affected service.
Thus, via registry (yes, you need to read my tutorial on this subject):
Reboot, problem solved. No more Activity being logged, even if you have all the toggles on.
Conclusion
There you go. Another annoyance solved. Now, you could ask, well, what are the unintended downsides of this change? In order words, three months down the line, will something go wrong, and you won't be able to correlate the problem to this action? Well, I have no good answer to that. Normally, I am opposed to system tweaking, but something, unfortunately, it is necessary. After all, if the operating system won't respect my choices, and it logs stuff DESPITE my explicit instructions, I have no choice. I must act.
So yes, potentially, something could wrong. Due to the opaque nature of this service and its description, I cannot tell you what might depend on this nonsense and potentially refuse to work. In my pure-desktop, local-account usage scenario, things are fine. If you do use a Microsoft account, if you use "connected" devices of whatever kind, then I guess you want to keep the services working. So there you go. Now, recently, I've done quite a lot of service pruning on my Windows 11 test instance (never used for anything serious). I want to see what's the minimal viable set for a standard, conventional desktop use. That should be an interesting article of its own. Well, with those words, plus some necessary caution one must exercise whenever they tinker with system defaults, I bid you farewell. Bye bye, folks.
Cheers.