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"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."

Astonishing. They clearly feel their users have no choice but to accept this onerous and ridiculous requirement. As if users wouldn't understand that they'd have to go way out of their way to write the code which enforces this outcome. All for a feature which provides me dubious benefit. I know who the people in my photographs are. Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this?

Privacy legislation is clearly lacking. This type of action should bring the hammer down swiftly and soundly upon these gross and inappropriate corporate decision makers. Microsoft has needed that hammer blow for quite some time now. This should make that obvious. I guess I'll hold my breath while I see how Congress responds.

They could have avoided the negative press by changing the requirement to be that you can’t re-enable the feature after switching it off 3 times per year.

It’s not hard to guess the problem: Steady state operation will only incur scanning costs for newly uploaded photos, but toggling the feature off and then on would trigger a rescan of every photo in the library. That’s a potentially very expensive operation.

If you’ve ever studied user behavior you’ve discovered situations where users toggle things on and off in attempts to fix some issue. Normally this doesn’t matter much, but when a toggle could potentially cost large amounts of compute you have to be more careful.

For the privacy sensitive user who only wants to opt out this shouldn’t matter. Turn the switch off, leave it off, and it’s not a problem. This is meant to address the users who try to turn it off and then back on every time they think it will fix something. It only takes one bad SEO spam advice article about “How to fix _____ problem with your photos” that suggests toggling the option to fix some problem to trigger a wave of people doing it for no reason.

Did anyone notice that Microsoft never replied any of the asked questions, but deflected them?

They are exactly where I left them 20 years ago.

It's very sad that I can't stop using them again for doing this.

You can really tell that Microsoft has adopted advertising as a major line of business.

The privacy violations they are racking up are very reminiscent of prior behavior we've seen from Facebook and Google.

> and follow Microsoft's compliance with General Data Protection Regulation

Not in a million years. See you in court. As often, just because a press statement says something, it's not necessarily true and maybe only used to defuse public perception.

Do you think the PR person responding here feels, underneath it all, the inhumanity of their responses? The fact that they're merely wasting everyone's time with their prevaricated non-answers? Knowing what they need to say to keep their job but hurting internally at the stupidity of it all.

Or do they end up so enmeshed with the corporate machine that that they start to really believe it all makes sense?

Truly bizarre. I'm so glad I detached from Windows a few years back, and now when I have to use it or another MS product (eg an Xbox) it's such an unpleasant experience, like notification hell with access control checks to read the notifications.

The sad thing is that they've made it this way, as opposed to Windows being inherently deficient; it used to be a great blend of GUI convenience with ready access to advanced functionality for those who wanted it, whereas MacOS used to hide technical things from a user a bit too much and Linux desktop environments felt primitive. Nowadays MS seems to think of its users as if they were employees or livestock rather than customers.

> You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year.

Who's making the t-shirts? Don't forget the Microsoft logo. They're proud of this!

In my head it's sounding like that Christmas jingle. It's the most wonderful time of the year!

This is once again strongly suggesting that Microsoft is thoroughly doomed if the money they've dumped into AI doesn't pan out. It seems to me that if your company is tied to Microsoft's cloud platform, you should probably consider moving away as quickly as you can. Paying the vmware tax and moving eveyrthing in house is probably a better move at this point.

Fedora with vanilla Gnome is excellent for anyone looking for an alternative.

I don't really see the issue. If you don't want the face recognition feature, then you'll turn it off once, and that's that. Maybe if you're unsure, you might turn it off, and then back on, and then back off again. But what's the use case where you'd want to do this more than 3x per year?

Presumably, it's somewhat expensive to run face recognition on all of your photos. When you turn it off, they have to throw away the index (they'd better be doing this for privacy reasons), and then rebuild it from scratch when you turn the feature on again.

Seems obvious they actually mean to limit the number of times you can opt in. Very poor choice of words.

This made me look up if you can disable iOS photo scanning and you can’t. Hmm.

I was quite happy for a couple years to just use windows and wsl. Fully switched to Linux at home and Linux VM's at work. The thirst and desperation to make AI work gives me the creeps more than usual.

Why would anyone use this crap at this point? Buy a (possible used) mini PC or thin client, install Linux and Samba on it, and voila, your own private "cloud" completely free of corporate interference, spyware and recurring fees. This works best with a static IP for remote access via Wireguard but it can be made to work on a residential connection.

With a little more effort you can deploy Nextcloud, Home Assistant and a few other great FOSS projects and completely free yourself from Big Tech. The hardest part will probably be email on a residential connection, but it can be done with the help of a relay service for outgoing mail.

Microsoft gets a lot less difficult to reason about when we start to think of it as a statistical mean of human nature rather than the mind of one arbitrary evil bastard. They have 228k employees. The CEO has virtually zero direct influence on the end work product of any team.

Any organization this large is going to have approximately the same level of dysfunction overall. But, there are almost always parts of these organizations where specific leaders have managed to carve out a fiefdom and provide some degree of actual value to the customer. In the case of Microsoft, examples of these would be things like .NET, C#, Visual Studio [Code], MSSQL, Xbox.

Windows, Azure & AI are where most of the rot exists at Microsoft. Office is a wash - I am not a huge fan of what has happened to my Outlook install over the years, but Teams has dramatically stabilized since the covid days. Throwing away the rest of the apple because of a few blemishes is a really wasteful strategy.

Microsoft: forces OneDrive on users via dark pattern dialogs that many users just accept

Users: save files "on their PC" (they think)

Microsoft: Rolls out AI photo-scanning feature to unknowing users intending to learn something.

Users: WTF? And there are rules on turning it on and off?

Microsoft: We have nothing more to share at this time.

Favorite quote from the article:

> [Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]

It really seems as though Microsoft has total contempt for their retail/individual customers. They do a lot to inconvenience those users, and it often seems gratuitous and unnecessary. (As it does in this case.)

...I guess Microsoft believes that they're making up for it in AI and B2B/Cloud service sales? Or that customers are just so locked-in that there's genuinely no alternative? I don't believe that the latter is true, and it's hard to come back from a badly tarnished brand. Won't be long before the average consumer hates Microsoft as much as they hate HP (printers).

> Slashdot: What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year? (And are those any three times — or does that mean three specific days, like Christmas, New Year's Day, etc.)

> [Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]

That’s not opt out. Opt out is the ability to say no. If you’re not allowed to say no there’s no consent and you’re being forced.

Microsoft is such a scummy company. They always were but they've become even worse since they've gone all in on AI.

I wonder if this is also a thing for their EU users. I can think of a few laws this violates.

Presumably you just need to turn it off once, right?

Growing up, Microsoft dominance felt so strong. 3 decades later, there’s a really high chance my kids will never own or use a windows machine (unless their jobs gives them one).

Microsoft in the past few years has totally lost it's mind, it's ruining nearly everything it touches and I can't understand why

I was afraid for the EU economy, but after this declaration I'm reassured that Microsoft will pay for my grand kids' education in 30 years.

This doesn't feel like a problem at all. I only need to turn the setting off once, right? My immediate question to seeing that verbiage was, "how many times does the setting turn itself on in a year?"

Does this mean that when you disable, all labels are deleted, and when you turn it back on it has to re-scan all of your photos? Could this be a cost-saving measure?

I think a call to Australia’s privacy commissioner might be in order.

> I uploaded a photo on my phone to Microsoft's

That's your problem right there.

> Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning

Their _UI_ says they let you opt out. I wouldn't bet on that actually being the case. At the very least - a copy of your photos goes to the US government, and they do whatever they want with it.

Reminder: Microsoft owns Github and NPM.

Year of the Linux desktop edges ever closer.

Crossposting slashdot?

Heaven forfend!

How is this not a revenge porn or something? If I upload sensitive photos somewhere, it is 5 years prison sentence! CEO of Microsoft can do that billion times!

I've never seen a better case for uploading endless AI slop photos.

There's a great solution to this.

Just stop using Microsoft shit. It's a lot easier than untangling yourself from Google.

Makes me want to download and install windows, and store a picture of my hairy brown nutsack with googly eyes on it.

Isn't it cute when there's absolutely no rationale behind a new rule, and it's simply an incursion made in order to break down a boundary?

Look, scanning with AI is available!

Wow, scanning with AI is now free for everyone!

What? Scanning with AI is now opt-out?

Why would opting-out be made time-limited?

WTF, what's so special about 3x a year? Is it because it's the magic number?

Ah, the setting's gone again, I guess I can relax. I guess the market wanted this great feature, or else they wouldn't have gradually forced it on us. Anyway, you're a weird techie for noticing it. What do you have to hide?

fuck microsoft