Windows 10 is getting a neat little security feature called 'Dynamic Lock'

With the release of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002, Microsoft added a host of new features to Windows 10. Redmond introduced major new features such as a built-in F.lux-like feature which helps you sleep better, app folders on the Start Menu, massive improvements to Microsoft Edge, and even the Settings app. There is a pretty interesting, undocumented feature in this build of Windows 10 called Dynamic Locking — which is apparently known as “Windows Goodbye” internally.

Windows Goodbye, as the name suggests, is essentially the opposite of Windows Hello — it intelligently locks your device when you are away from your computer. How this feature actually works is yet to be known, but our guess is that Windows will automatically lock your device when you’re away for 10-15 minutes. In this case, this feature isn’t exactly new in Windows since it was previously available in Windows 8.1 (as well as Windows 10) — but it didn’t have any name like “Dynamic Lock”.

It is possible Microsoft is using Windows Hello’s features to detect if you are away from your device or not which is pretty clever but we weren’t able to test this out due to the fact that Windows Hello is broken on some devices in this preview release. What we can confirm is that Dynamic Lock doesn’t lock your device as soon as you step away from your PC which would be quite inconvenient.

Nevertheless, Dynamic Lock does look like a pretty sweet feature which will be immensely useful if you forget to lock your device when you are away from the device for a short while — but this is likely to be even more useful to business customers.