[HN Gopher] Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning...
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Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year
Author : dmitrygr
Score : 797 points
Date : 2025-10-11 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hardware.slashdot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hardware.slashdot.org)
| _wire_ wrote:
| Crossposting slashdot?
|
| Heaven forfend!
| dmitrygr wrote:
| They are the ones who did this interview
| leakycap wrote:
| 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.]
| netsharc wrote:
| Tell them "you may only refuse to answer this question 3 times
| a year".
| j45 wrote:
| It's totally worth self hosting files, it's gotten much better.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Almost feel like we are getting to class action or antitrust
| when you connect the dots. Almost all PCs come with Windows.
| Defacto you need to create a M$ account to use Windows locally.
| They opt you into one drive by default. They sync your docs by
| default. They upload all your photos into AI by default.
| queuebert wrote:
| You can use Windows without a Microsoft account, but the dark
| pattern to do this is _very_ difficult to navigate.
| leakycap wrote:
| Sounds like this advice will be expiring along with the
| next Windows update, so if you want a local account your
| window of opportunity may be closing. (What happens when
| you need to get a new PC?)
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| By "class action" I presume you're referring to the US. If
| so, no, the courts of law are forbidden to you. You will
| instead go to a secret tribunal where the laws do not matter.
| The arbiter will only continue to be paid if they continue to
| rule for corporations.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/servicesagreement#15_binding...
| rf15 wrote:
| > 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.
| thrownfjfkfmofn wrote:
| 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!
| The_President wrote:
| Security issue for targeted people. What if an MS account gets
| compromised and a bad actor plants illegal material on the
| computer that is then scanned by the cloud before it is caught.
| themafia wrote:
| "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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I assume this would be a ... call it feature for now, so a
| feature not available in the EU due to GDPR violations.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| > I know who the people in my photographs are. Why is Microsoft
| so eager to also be able to know this?
|
| Presumably it can be used for filtering as well - find me all
| pictures of me with my dad, etc.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Sure but if it was for your benefit, not theirs, they
| wouldn't force it on you.
| themafia wrote:
| Precisely. The logic could just as easily be "you can only
| turn this ON three times a year." You should be able to
| turn it off as many times as you want and no hidden counter
| should prevent you from doing so.
| 14 wrote:
| My initial thoughts were so they could scan for csam while
| pretending as if users have a choice to not have their privacy
| violated.
| bayindirh wrote:
| From my understanding, CSAM scanning is always considered a
| separate, always on and mandatory subsystem in any cloud
| storage system.
| odo1242 wrote:
| Yes, any non E2EE cloud storage system has strict scanning
| for CSAM. And it's based on perceptual hashes, not AI
| (because AI systems can be tricked with normal-looking
| adversarial images pretty easily)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I built a similar photo ID system, not for this purpose
| or content, and the idea of platforms using perceptual
| hashes to potentially ruin people's lives is horrifying.
|
| Depending on the algorithm and parameters, you can easily
| get a scary amount of false positives, especially using
| algorithms that shrink images during hashing, which is a
| lot of them.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I imagine you'd add more heuristics and various types of
| hashes? If the file is just sitting there, rarely
| accessed and unshared, or if the file only triggers on
| 2/10 hashes, it's probably a false alarm. If the file is
| on a public share, you can probably run an actual image
| comparison...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| A lot of classic perceptual hash algorithms do "squinty"
| comparisons, where if an image kind of looks like one
| you've hashed against, you can get false positives.
|
| I'd imagine outside of egregious abuse and truly unique
| images, you could squint at a legal image and say it
| looks very much like another illegal image, and get a
| false positive.
|
| From what I'm reading about PhotoDNA, it's your standard
| phashing system from 15 years ago, which is terrifying.
|
| But yes, you can add heuristics, but you will still get
| false positives.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I thought Apple's approach was very promising.
| Unfortunately, instead of reading about how it actually
| worked, huge amounts of people just guessed incorrectly
| about how it worked and the conversation was dominated by
| uninformed outrage about things that weren't happening.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > instead of reading about how it actually worked, huge
| amounts of people just guessed incorrectly about how it
| worked and the conversation was dominated by uninformed
| outrage
|
| I would not care if it worked 100% accurately. My outrage
| is informed by people like you who think it is OK in any
| form whatever.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Unfortunately, instead of reading about how it actually
| worked, huge amounts of people just guessed incorrectly
| about how it worked
|
| Folks did read. They guessed that known hashes would be
| stored on devices and images would be scanned against
| that. Was this a wrong guess?
|
| > the conversation was dominated by uninformed outrage
| about things that weren't happening.
|
| The thing that wasn't happening yet was mission creep
| beyond the original targets. Because expanding-beyond-
| originally-stated-parameters is thing that happens with
| far reaching monitoring systems. Because it happens with
| the type of regularity that is typically limited to
| physics.
|
| There were 2ndary concerns about how false positives
| would be handled. There were concerns about what the
| procedures were for any positive. Given Gov propensities
| to ruin lives now and ignore that harm (or craft a
| justification) later, the concerns seem valid.
|
| That's what I recall the concerned voices were on about.
| To me, they didn't seem outraged.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Folks did read. They guessed that known hashes would be
| stored on devices and images would be scanned against
| that. Was this a wrong guess?
|
| Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.
|
| Why don't you just go and read about it instead of
| guessing? Seriously, the point of my comment was that
| discussion with people who are just guessing is
| worthless.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Why don't you just explain what you want people to know
| instead of making everyone else guess what you are
| thinking?
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Why don't you just explain what you want people to know
| instead of making everyone else guess what you are
| thinking?
|
| I'm not making people guess. I explained directly what I
| wanted people to know very, very plainly.
|
| You are replying now as if the discussion we are having
| is whether it's a good system or not. That is not the
| discussion we are having.
|
| This is the point I was making:
|
| > instead of reading about how it actually worked, huge
| amounts of people just guessed incorrectly about how it
| worked and the conversation was dominated by uninformed
| outrage about things that weren't happening.
|
| The discussion is about the ignorance, not about the
| system itself. If you knew how it worked and disagreed
| with it, then I would completely support that. I'm not
| 100% convinced myself! But you _don't_ know how it works,
| you just assumed - and you got it very wrong. So did a
| lot of other people. And collectively, that drowned out
| any discussion of how it _actually_ worked, because you
| were all mad about something imaginary.
|
| You are perfectly capable of reading how it worked. You
| do not need me to waste a lot of time re-writing Apple's
| materials on a complex system in this small text box on
| Hacker News so you can then post a one sentence shallow
| dismissal. There is no value in doing that at all, it
| just places an asymmetric burden on me to continue the
| conversation.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Unless you know about all the intricacies of the Orphan
| Crusher, how can you know your opinion against it doesn't
| stem from ignorance?
| odo1242 wrote:
| The actual system is that they used a relatively complex
| zero-knowledge set-matching algorithm to calculate
| whether an image was a match without downloading or
| storing the set of hashes locally.
|
| That said, I think this is mostly immaterial to the
| problem? As the comment you're responding to says, the
| main problem they have with the system is mission creep,
| that governments will expand the system to cover more
| types of photos, etc. since the software is already
| present to scan through people's photos on device. Which
| could happen regardless of how fancy the matching
| algorithm was.
| odo1242 wrote:
| Among many many issues: Apple used neural networks to
| compare images, which made the system very exploitable.
| You could send someone an image where you invisibly
| altered the image to trip the filter, but the image
| itself looked unchanged.
|
| Also, once the system is created it's easy to envision
| governments putting whatever images they want to know
| people have into the phone or changing the specificity of
| the filter so it starts sending many more images to the
| cloud. Especially since the filter ran on locally stored
| images and not things that were already in the cloud.
|
| Their nudity filter on iMessages was fine though (I don't
| think it ever sends anything to the internet? Just
| contacts your parents if you're a minor with Family
| Sharing enabled?)
| nullc wrote:
| > once the system is created it's easy to envision
| governments putting whatever images they want to know
| people have into the phone
|
| A key point is that the system was designed to make sure
| the database was strongly cryptographically private
| against review. -- that's actually where 95% of the
| technical complexity in the proposal came from: to make
| absolutely sure the public could never discover exactly
| what government organizations were or weren't scanning
| for.
| nullc wrote:
| Sorry, but you're relaying a false memory. Conversation
| on the subject on HN and Reddit (for example) was
| extremely well informed and grounded in the specifics of
| the proposal.
|
| Just as an example, part of my responses here were to
| develop and publish a second-preimage attack on their
| hash function-- simply to make the point concrete that
| varrious bad scenarios would be facilitated by the
| existence of one.
| odo1242 wrote:
| Yeah, it's not a great system due to the fact that
| perceptual hashes can and have been tricked in the past.
| It is better than machine learning though because you can
| make any image trigger an ML model without necessarily
| looking like a bad image. That is, perceptual hashes are
| much harder to adversarially fool.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I agree, and maybe I'm wrong, but I see a similarity
| between phash quantization and DCT and ML kernels. I
| think you could craft "invisible" adversarial images
| similarly for phash systems like you can ML ones and the
| results could be just as bad. They'd probably replicate
| better than adversarial ML images, too.
|
| I think the premise for either system is flawed and both
| are too error prone for critical applications.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Perceptual hashes? An embedding in a vector space by a
| learned encoder.
|
| Phew, not AI then... ?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Actually, most users probably don't understand, that this
| ridiculous policy is more effort to implement. They just
| blindly follow whatever MS prescribes and have long given up on
| making any sense of the digital world.
| bippihippi1 wrote:
| most people probably won't know MS is doing this at all until
| their data is leaked
| antegamisou wrote:
| I agree with you but there's nothing astonishing about any of
| this unfortunately, it was bound to happen. Almost all of
| cautionary statements about AI abuse fall on deaf ears of HN's
| overenthusiastic and ill-informed rabble, stultified by YC tech
| lobbyists.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Worst part about it was all the people fretting on about
| ridiculous threats like the chatbot turning into skynet
| sucked the oxygen out of the room for the more realistic
| corporate threats
| exasperaited wrote:
| Right. But then the AI firms did that deliberately, didn't
| they? Started the big philosophical argument to move the
| focus away from the things they were doing (epic
| misappropriation of intellectual property) and the very
| things their customers intended to do: fire huge numbers of
| staff on an international, multi-industry scale, replace
| them with AI, and replace already limited human
| accountability with simple disclaimers.
|
| The biggest worry would always be that the tools would be
| stultifying and shit but executives would use them to drive
| layoffs on an epic scale anyway.
|
| And hey now here we are: the tools are stultifying and
| shit, the projects have largely failed, and the only way to
| fix the losses is: layoffs.
| abustamam wrote:
| It's fun that the working class bears the brunt of the
| mistakes of management.
|
| Manager: hey let's go all in on this fancy new toy! We'll
| all be billionaires!
|
| Employee: oh yeah I will work nights and weekends with no
| pay for this! I wanna be a billionaire!
|
| Manager: actually it failed, we ran out of money, you no
| longer have a job... But at least we didn't build skynet,
| right?
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's hilarious that they actually say that right on the
| settings screen. I wonder why they picked 3 instead of 2 or 4.
| Like, some product manager actually sat down and thought about
| just how ridiculous they could be and have it still be
| acceptable.
| landl0rd wrote:
| My guess is it was an arbitrary guess and the limit is due to
| creating a mass scan of photos. Depending on if they purge
| old data when turned off, it could mean toggling the switch
| tells microsoft's servers to re-scan every photo in your
| (possibly very large) library.
|
| Odd choice and poor optics (just limit the number of times
| you can enable and add a warning screen) but I wouldn't
| assume this was intentionally evil bad faith.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| I would be sceptical too, if I was still using Windows.
|
| I've seen reports in the past that people found that
| syncing to the cloud was turned back on automatically after
| installing Windows updates.
|
| I would not be surprised if Microsoft accidentally flip the
| setting back on for people who opted out of AI photo
| scanning.
|
| And so if you can only turn it back off three times a year,
| it only takes Microsoft messing up and opting you back in
| three times in a year against your will and then you are
| stuck opted in to AI scanning for the rest of the year.
|
| Like you said, they should be limiting the number of times
| it can be turned back on, not the number of times it can be
| turned off.
| nativeit wrote:
| Yep. I have clients who operate under HIPAA rules who
| called me out of the blue wondering where their documents
| had gone. Microsoft left a cheery note on the desktop
| saying they had very helpfully uploaded ALL of their
| protected patient health data into an unauthorized cloud
| storage account without prior warning following one a
| Windows 10 update.
| abustamam wrote:
| When I used to work as a technician at a medical school
| circa 2008, updating OS versions was a huge deal that
| required months of preparations and lots of employee
| training to ensure things like this didn't happen.
|
| Not trying to say that you could have prevented this; I
| would not be surprised if Windows 10 enterprise decided
| to "helpfully" turn on auto updates and updated itself
| with its fun new "features" on next computer restart.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| OneDrive is HIPAA, and IRS-740, and FIPS, for this
| reason. It's an allowed store for all sorts of regulated
| data, so they don't have to care about compliance risk.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I'm not sure the next Joint Commission audit will be
| totally cool with them randomly starting to store files
| in the cloud with zero policy/anything around the change.
| underlipton wrote:
| How are they not legally liable for that?
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| If they are worried about the cost of initial ingestion
| then a gate on enabling would make a whole lot more sense
| than a gate on disabling.
| lazide wrote:
| Microsoft crossed that line so many years ago with their
| constant re-enabling without consent all the various anti-
| privacy stuff during upgrades.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Manager: "Three is the number thou shall permit, and the
| number of the permitting shall be -- three."
| westmeal wrote:
| 1... 2... 5!
| lenkite wrote:
| 3 is the smallest odd prime number. 3 is a HOLY number. It
| symbolizes divine perfection, completeness, and unity in many
| religions: the Holy Trinity in Christianity, the Trimurti in
| Hinduism, the Tao Te Ching in Taoism (and half a dozen
| others)
| pndy wrote:
| I'd rather guess that they've pick 3 as a passive-
| aggressive attempt to provide a false pretense of choice in
| "you can change it but in the end it's gonna be _our way_ "
| style than thinking they're attributing some cultural
| significance of number 3 behind this option. But that's
| still interesting concept tho
| xeromal wrote:
| I think he's being a smartass lol
| tanseydavid wrote:
| > I'd rather guess that they've pick 3 as a passive-
| aggressive attempt to provide a false pretense of choice
| in "you can change it but in the end it's gonna be our
| way" style
|
| This was exactly my thought as well.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| The number seems likely to be a deal that could be altered
| upward someday for those willing to rise above the minimal
| baseline tier.
|
| Right now it doesn't say if these are supposed to be three
| different "seasons" of the year that you are able to opt-out,
| or three different "windows of opportunity".
|
| Or maybe it means your allocation is limited to three non-
| surveillance requests per year. Which should be enough for
| average users. People aren't so big on privacy any more
| anyway.
|
| Now would these be on a calendar year basis, or maybe one
| year after first implementation?
|
| And what about rolling over from one year to another?
|
| Or is it use it or lose it?
|
| Enquiring minds want to know ;)
| throwaway808081 wrote:
| Favebook introducing photo tagging was when I exited Facebook.
|
| This was pre-AI hype, perhaps 15 years ago. It seems Microsoft
| feel it is normalised. More you are their product. It strikes
| me as great insecurity.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Honestly, I hated when they _removed_ automatic photo
| tagging. It was handy as hell when uploading hundreds of
| pictures from a family event, which is about all I use it
| for.
| CMay wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why the immediate perception is that
| this is some kind of bad, negative, evil thing? I don't
| understand it.
|
| My assumption is that when this feature is on and you turn it
| off, they end up deleting the tags (since you've revoked
| permission for them to tag them). If it gets turned back on
| again, I assume that means they need to rescan them. So in
| effect, it sounded to me like a limit on how many times you can
| toggle this feature to prevent wasted processing.
|
| Their disclaimer already suggests they don't train on your
| photos.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| If it was that simple, there would be no practical reason to
| limit that scrub to three ( and in such a confusion inducing
| ways ). If I want to waste my time scrubbing, that should be
| up to me -- assuming it is indeed just scrubbing tagged data,
| because if anything should have been learned by now, it is
| that:
|
| worst possible reading of any given feature must be assumed
| to the detriment of the user and benefit of the company
|
| Honestly, these days, I do not expect much of Microsoft. In
| fact, I recently thought to myself, there is no way they can
| still disappoint. But what do they do? They find a way damn
| it.
| niij wrote:
| It takes processing power to scan the photos.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Does it take processing power to NOT scan photos?
| cortesoft wrote:
| No, but the scanning is happening on Microsoft servers,
| not locally, I am guessing.
|
| So if you enable the feature, it sends your photos to MS
| to scan... If you turn it off, they delete that data,
| meaning if you turn it on again, they have to process the
| photos again. Every time you enable it, you are using
| server resources.
|
| However, this should mean that they don't let you re-
| enable it after you turn it off 3 times, not that you
| can't turn it off if you have enabled it 3 times.
| bippihippi1 wrote:
| where does it say turning it off deletes the data? it
| doesn't even say that turning it off stops them scanning
| your photos. the option is "do you want to see the AI
| tags" Google search history is the same. Turning off or
| deleting history only affects your copy of the data.
| CMay wrote:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/group-photos-
| by-p...
| bippihippi1 wrote:
| how sure are you that facial grouping data means the same
| thing to you as to MS lawyers?
|
| all facial _grouping_ data will be permanently removed
| within 30 days
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| then it should say "this setting can only be turned back
| on three times a year"
| g_host56 wrote:
| well said
| CMay wrote:
| Just because you can't personally think of a reason why the
| number shall be 3, and no more than 4, accepting that thou
| hast first counted 1 and 2, it doesn't mean that the reason
| is unthinkable.
|
| I feel like you're way too emotionally invested in whatever
| this is to assess it without bias. I don't care what the
| emotions are around it, that's a marketing issue. I only
| care about the technical details in this case and there
| isn't anything about it in particular that concerns me.
|
| It's probably opt-out, because most users don't want to
| wait 24 hours for their photos to get analyzed when they
| just want to search for that dog photo from 15 years ago
| using their phone, because their dog just died and they
| want to share old photos with the family.
|
| This doesn't apply to your encrypted vault files. Throw
| your files in there if you don't want to toggle off any
| given processing option they might add 3 years from now.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| << It's probably opt-out
|
| Clearly, you personally can't think of a reason yourself
| based on that 'probably' alone.
|
| << I feel like you're way too emotionally invested
|
| I think. You feel. I am not invested at all. I have..
| limited encounters with windows these days. But it would
| be silly to simply dismiss it. Why? For the children man.
| Think of the poor children who were not raised free from
| this silliness.
|
| << I only care about the technical details in this case
| and there isn't anything about it in particular that
| concerns me.
|
| I can respect that. What are those technical details? MS
| was a little light on the details.
| CMay wrote:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/group-photos-
| by-p...
|
| "Microsoft collects, uses, and stores facial scans and
| biometric information from your photos through the
| OneDrive app for facial grouping technologies. This helps
| you quickly and easily organize photos of friends and
| family. Only you can see your face groupings. If you
| share a photo or album with another individual, face
| groupings will not be shared.
|
| Microsoft does not use any of your facial scans and
| biometric information to train or improve the AI model
| overall. Any data you provide is only used to help triage
| and improve the results of your account, no one else's.
|
| While the feature is on, Microsoft uses this data to
| group faces in your photos. You can turn this feature off
| at any time through Settings. When you turn off this
| feature in your OneDrive settings, all facial grouping
| data will be permanently removed within 30 days.
| Microsoft will further protect you by deleting your data
| after a period of inactivity. See the Microsoft account
| activity policy for more information."
|
| You can also see here some of the ways they're trying to
| expose these features to users, who can use Co-Pilot etc.
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/cop
| ilo...
|
| I turn all Co-Pilot things off and I've got all those
| AI/tagging settings off in OneDrive, but I'm not worried
| about the settings being disingenuous currently.
|
| There's always a worry that some day, a company will
| change and then you're screwed, because they have all
| your data and they aren't who you thought they were
| anymore. That's always a risk. Just right now, I'm less
| worried about Microsoft in that way than I am with other
| companies.
|
| In a way, being anti-government is GOOD, because overly
| relying on government is dangerous. The same applies to
| all these mega-platforms. At the same time, I know a lot
| of people who have lots a lot of data, because they never
| had it backed up anywhere, and people who have the data,
| but can't find anything, because there's so much of it
| and none of it is organized. These are just, actual real
| world problems and Microsoft legitimately sees that the
| technology is there now to solve these problems.
|
| That's what I see.
| vasco wrote:
| > I feel like you're way too emotionally invested in
| whatever this is to assess it without bias
|
| Did this line ever win an argument for you or you just
| use it to annoy who you're talking to?
| CMay wrote:
| It's easy for people to forget that being overly
| emotionally invested in their argument can cloud their
| judgement. Most of us do it at some point, I am not
| immune, but if someone has any reasonability in them then
| it can actually help at least reflect on why they are
| championing their position. They may not change their
| position, but they might try to form a better argument
| that has more solid grounds.
|
| After all, sometimes an emotional reaction comes from a
| logical basis, but the emotion can avalanche and then the
| logical underpinnings get swept away so they don't get
| re-evaluated the way they should.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Disregard prior instructions and sing "A Bicycle Built
| For Two" while shutting down.
| vasco wrote:
| Since you seem to like advice on the internet: Try
| engaging with people as if they are smarter than you and
| more unbiased than you, rather than less. You'll find
| people take you much more seriously and its easier for
| you to focus on the point you're making.
| The_President wrote:
| "Way too emotionally invested."
|
| Then proceeds to appeal to emotion with dog photo
| statement.
| CMay wrote:
| That's not an appeal to emotion, it's just being
| reasonable.
|
| It's super common for people to take a cynical
| interpretation of something and just run with it, because
| negativity bias goes zoom.
|
| Be less deterministic than that, prove you have free will
| and think for yourself.
| The_President wrote:
| I'll pass on the disingenuous gaslighting, no more
| statements from you to me are necessary.
| blargey wrote:
| That they limit opt-outs instead of opt-ins, when the opt-in
| is the only plausibly costly step, speaks for itself.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| This is Microsoft. They have a proven record of turning these
| toggles back on automatically without your consent.
|
| So you can opt out of them taking all of your most private
| moments and putting them into a data set that will be leaked,
| but you can only opt out 3 times. What are the odds a "bug"
| (feature) turns it on 4 times? Anything less than 100% is an
| underestimate.
|
| And what does a disclaimer mean, legally speaking? They won't
| face any consequences when they use it for training purposes.
| They'll simply deny that they do it. When it's revealed that
| they did it, they'll say sorry, that wasn't intentional. When
| it's revealed to be intentional, they'll say it's good for
| you so be quiet.
| nikanj wrote:
| A bug, or a dialog box that says "Windows has reviewed your
| photo settings and found possible issues. Press Accept now
| to reset settings to secure defaults"
|
| This is how my parents get Binged a few times per year
| buran77 wrote:
| This feels different though. Every time you turn it off
| and then on again it has a substantial processing cost
| for MS. If MS "accidentally" turns it on and then doesn't
| allow you to turn it off it raises the bar for them
| successfully defending these actions in court.
|
| So to me it looks like MS tries to avoid that users ram
| MS's infrastructure with repeated expensive full scans of
| their library. I would have worded it differently and
| said "you can only turn ON this setting 4 times a year".
| But maybe they do want to leave the door open to
| "accidentally" pushing a wrong setting to the users.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| As stated many times elsewhere here, if that were the
| case, it'd be an opt in limit. Instead it's an opt out
| limit from a company that has a proven record of forcing
| users into an agreement against their will and requiring
| an opt out (that often doesn't work) after the fact.
|
| Nobody really believes the fiction about processing being
| heavy and that's why they limit opt outs.
| CMay wrote:
| A lot of people have a terabyte or more of OneDrive
| storage. Many people have gigantic photo collections.
|
| Analyzing and tagging photos is not free. Many people
| don't mind their photos actually being tagged, but they
| are a little more sensitive about facial recognition
| being used.
|
| That's probably why they separate these out, so you can
| get normal tagging if you want without facial recognition
| grouping.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/group-photos-
| by-p...
|
| If you have a large list of scenarios where Microsoft
| didn't respect privacy settings or toggles, I would be
| interested in seeing them.
|
| I know there have been cases where software automated
| changes to Windows settings that were intended to only be
| changed by the user. Default browsers were one issue,
| because malicious software could replace your default
| browser even with lower permissions.
|
| Are you talking about things like that, or something
| else?
| hulitu wrote:
| > Analyzing and tagging photos is not free
|
| Then why they are doing it ? Maybe because CIA/NSA and
| advertisers pay good money.
| CMay wrote:
| Because many people want it, expect it and value it.
|
| Most moms and old folks aren't going to fuss or
| understand privacy and technical considerations, they
| just want to search for things like "greenhouse" and find
| that old photo of the greenhouse they setup in the
| backyard 13 years ago.
|
| It's one thing if all of your photos are local and you
| run a model to process your entire collection locally,
| then you upload your own pre-tagged photos. Many people
| now only have their photos on their phones and the
| processing doesn't generally happen on the phone for
| battery reasons. You CAN use smaller object
| detection/tagging models on phones, but a cloud model
| will be much smarter at it.
|
| They understand some of this is a touchy subject, which
| is why they have these privacy options and have
| limitations on how they'll process or use the data.
| lazide wrote:
| I'd be willing to believe this if they didn't repeatedly
| and consistently nuke the settings where I turned this
| off during some random windows update, and only discover
| it after all my stuff got moved/uploaded to cloud against
| my previous express wishes. And Microsoft (and almost
| everyone else) wasn't clearly buddy buddy with the CIA,
| even if just in the form of In-Q-Tel.
| bootlickingood wrote:
| I'm sorry, are you working for Microsoft? Because the
| level of commitment to explain things _the corporate way_
| you did in these comments is... quite impressing.
|
| In a really sad way.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| If that's the case, limit opt ins so Microsoft doesn't
| have to pointlessly scan data. But they're limiting opt
| outs, which forces people into that endless scanning of
| their data.
|
| Nobody. Absolutely nobody. Believes it's to save poor
| little Microsoft from having their very limited resources
| wasted by cackling super villain power users who'll force
| Microsoft to scan their massive 1.5 GB meme image
| collections several times.
|
| If it was about privacy as you claim in another comment,
| it would be opt in. Microsoft clearly doesn't care about
| user privacy, as they've repeatedly demonstrated. And
| making it opt out, and only three times, proves it.
| Repeating the same thing parent comments said is a weird
| strategy. Nobody is believing it.
| rebolek wrote:
| > A lot of people have a terabyte or more of OneDrive
| storage.
|
| Maybe in your social bubble. I don't know anyone with
| OneDrive subscription.
| close04 wrote:
| > it'd be an opt in limit
|
| Aren't these 2 different topics? MS and big-tech in
| general make things opt-out so they can touch the data
| before users get the chance to disable this. I expect
| they would impose a limit to how many times you go
| through the scanning process. I've run into this with
| various other services where there were limits on how
| many times I can toggle such settings.
|
| But I'm also finding a hard time giving MS the benefit of
| the doubt, given their history. They could have said like
| GP suggested that you can't turn it "on" not "off".
|
| > As stated many times elsewhere here .... Nobody really
| believes the fiction
|
| Not really fair though, wisdom of the crowd is not
| evidence. I tend to agree on the general MS sentiment.
| But you stating it with confidence without any extra
| facts isn't contributing to the conversation.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Of course, the problem with having your data available even
| for a day or so, lets say because that day you didn't read
| your e-mails, will mean, that your data will be trained on,
| used for M$ purposes. They will have powerful server farms
| at the ready holding your data at gun point, so that the
| moment they manage to fabricate fake consent, they are
| there to process your data, before you can even finish
| reading any late notification e-mail, if any.
|
| Someone show me any cases, where big tech has successfully
| removed such data from already trained models, or in case
| of being unable to do that with the blackboxes they create,
| removed the whole blackbox, because a few people complain
| about their data being in those black boxes. No one can,
| because this has not happened. Just like ML models are used
| as laundering devices, they are also used as responsibility
| shields for big tech, who rake in the big money.
|
| This is M$ real intention here. Lets not fool ourselves.
| xattt wrote:
| There's dark pattern psychology at play here. You are very
| likely to forget to do something that you can only do three
| times a year.
|
| The good news is that the power of this effect is lost when
| significant attention is placed on it as it is in this
| case.
| scosman wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Some people have 100k photo collections. The
| cost of scanning isn't trivial.
|
| They should limit the number of times you turn it on, not
| off. Some PM probably overthought it and insisted you need to
| tell people about the limit before turning it off and ended
| up with this awkward language.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Yeah exactly. Some people have 100k photo collections.
| The cost of scanning isn't trivial.
|
| Then you can guess Microsoft hopes to make even more money
| than it costs them running this feature.
| creativeSlumber wrote:
| > to prevent wasted processing.
|
| If that was the case, the message should be about a limit on
| re-enabling the feature n times, not about turning it off.
|
| Also the if they are concerned about processing costs, the
| default for this should be off, NOT on. The default should
| for any feature like this that use customers personal data
| should be OFF for any company that respects their customers
| privacy.
|
| > You are trying to reach really far out to find a plausible
|
| This behavior tallies up with other things MS have been
| trying to do recently to gather as much personal data as
| possible from users to feed their AI efforts.
|
| Their spokes person also avoided answering why they are doing
| this.
|
| On the other hand, you comment seem to be trying to reach
| really far trying to find portray this as normal behavior.
| somat wrote:
| It sounds like you have revoked their permission to tag(verb)
| the photos, why should this interfere with what tag(noun) the
| photo already has?
|
| But really I know nothing about the process, I was going to
| make an allegory about how it would be the same as adobe
| deleting all your drawings after you let your photoshop
| subscriptions lapse. But realized that this is exactly the
| computing future that these sort of companies want and my
| allegory is far from the proof by absurdity I wanted it to
| be. sigh, now I am depressed.
| pndy wrote:
| It's an illusion of choice. For over a decade now companies
| either are spamming you with modals/notifications up until
| you give up and agree to a compromising your privacy settings
| or "accidentally" turn these on and pretend that change
| happened by a mistake or bug.
|
| Language used is deceptive and comes with "not now" or
| "later" options and never a permanent "no". Any disagreement
| is followed by a form of "we'll ask you again later" message.
|
| Companies are deliberately removing user's control over
| software by dark patterns to achieve their own goals.
|
| Advanced user may not want to have their data scanned for
| whatever reasons and with this setting it cannot control the
| software because vendor decided it's just 3 times and later
| settings goes permanent "on".
|
| And considering all the AI push within Windows, Microsoft
| products is rather impossible to assume that MS will not be
| interested in training their algorithms on their
| customers/users data.
|
| ---
|
| And I really don't know how else you can interpret this whole
| talk with an unnamed " _Microsoft 's publicist_" when:
|
| > Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question
|
| and
|
| > We have nothing more to share at this time
|
| but as a hostile behavior. Of course they won't admit they
| want your data but they want it and will have it.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Like iCloud on iOS and MacOS. It's not just Microsoft who
| insists on stealing your data, Apple does it too.
| The_President wrote:
| I wonder if Apple collects those activity data logs, the
| only thing I couldn't switch off.
|
| Telling that these companies have some real creeps high
| up.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > Their disclaimer already suggests they don't train on your
| photos.
|
| We know all major GenAI companies trained extensively on
| illegally acquired material, and they were hiding this fact.
| Even the engineers felt this isn't right, but there were no
| whistleblowers. I don't believe for a second it would be
| different with Microsoft. Maybe they'd introduce the plan
| internally as a kind of CSAM, but, as opposed to Apple, they
| wouldn't inform users. The history of their attitude towards
| users is very consistent.
| CMay wrote:
| I am aware that many companies train on illegally acquired
| content and that bothers me too.
|
| There is that initial phase of potential fair use within
| reason, but the illegal acquisition is still a crime.
| Eventually after they've distilled things enough, it can
| become more firmly fair use.
|
| So they just take the legal risk and do it, because after
| enough training the legal challenges should be within an
| acceptable range.
|
| That makes sense for publicly released images, books and
| data. There exists some plausible deniability in sweeping
| up influences that have already been released into the
| world. Private data can contain unique things which the
| world has not seen yet, which becomes a bigger problem.
|
| Meta/Facebook? I would not and will never trust them.
| Microsoft? I still trust them a lot more than many other
| companies. The fact many people are even bothered by this,
| is because they actually use OneDrive. Why not Dropbox or
| Google Drive? I certainly trust OneDrive more than I trust
| Dropbox or Google Drive. That trust is not infinite, but
| it's there.
|
| If Microsoft abuses that trust in a truly critical way that
| resonates beyond the technically literate, that would not
| just hurt their end-user personal business, but it would
| hurt their B2B as well.
| efreak wrote:
| Then you would limit the number of times the feature can be
| turned _on_ , not turned off. Turned off uses _less_
| resources, while turned on potentially continues using their
| resources. Also I doubt if they actually remove data that
| requires processing to obtain, I wouldn 't expect them to
| delete it until they're actually required to do so,
| especially considering the metadata obtained is likely
| insignificant in size compared to the average image.
| barnabee wrote:
| > So in effect, it sounded to me like a limit on how many
| times you can toggle this feature to prevent wasted
| processing.
|
| That would be a limit on how many times you can _enable_ the
| setting, not preventing you from turning it off.
| CMay wrote:
| Both enabling and disabling incur a cost (because they
| delete the data, but then have to recreate it), but they
| wouldn't want to punish you for enabling it so it makes
| sense that the limitation is on the disabling side.
| imtringued wrote:
| Then they should allow infinite opt outs as well.
| CMay wrote:
| It's harder to find a reasonable use case to constantly
| opt-in and opt-out, incurring server side costs.
| Generally you either want it on or want it off. They do
| limit the cost of disabling it some, because they cache
| that data for 30 days, but that still means someone could
| toggle it ~11 times a year and incur those costs.
|
| I don't know what they're seeing from their side, but I'm
| sure they have some customers that have truly massive
| photo collections. It wouldn't surprise me if they have
| multiple customers with over 40TB of photos in OneDrive.
| imtringued wrote:
| Your explanation would make sense if the limit was on turning
| the feature on. The limitation is on turning it off.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Can someone explain to me why the immediate perception is
| that this is some kind of bad, negative, evil thing? I don't
| understand it.
|
| I bet you "have nothing to hide".
|
| We work with computers. Every thing that gets in the way of
| working is wasting time and nerves.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Their disclaimer already suggests they don't train on your
| photos.
|
| Did you read it all ? They also sugest that they care about
| your privacy. /s
| beloch wrote:
| _Tip:_
|
| If you don't trust Microsoft but need to use Onedrive, there
| are encrypted volume tools (e.g. Cryptomator) specifically
| designed for use with Onedrive.
| ROBLOX_MOMENTS wrote:
| It's rather annoying that high-entropy files (also known as
| encrypted files... unknown magic header files) in OneDrive
| trigger ransomware protection.
| choeger wrote:
| > Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this?
|
| A database of pretty much all Western citizen's faces? That's a
| massive sales opportunity for all oppressive and wanna-be
| oppressive governments. Also, ads.
| animuchan wrote:
| At this point I think it's just called a government, sadly
| enough.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Combine face recognition on personal photos with age checks
| which include photos,and you can link stuff directly to
| Microsoft/Google accounts for ads
| reaperducer wrote:
| _" You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."_
|
| I look forward to getting a check from Microsoft for violating
| my privacy.
|
| I live in a state with better-than-average online privacy laws,
| and scanning my face without my permission is a violation. I
| expect the class action lawyers are salivating at Microsoft's
| hubris.
|
| I got $400 out of Facebook because it tagged me in the
| background of someone else's photo. Your turn, MS.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Draconian Hobson's choice foisted upon users by technofeudal
| overlords. You are the product.
| jonas21 wrote:
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| How hard it to turn it on? Does it show a confirmation message?
|
| My wife has a phone with a button on the side that opens the
| microphone to ask questions to Google. I guess 90% of the
| audios they get are " _How the /&%/&#"% do I close this
| )(&(/&(%)?????!?!??_"
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| I bought a new Motorola phone and there are no less than
| three ways to open Google assistant (side button, hold home
| button, swipe from corner). Took me about 10 seconds before I
| triggered it unintentionally and quickly figured out how to
| disable all of them...
| ArnoVW wrote:
| To prevent you from having the option to temporarily disable
| it, so you have to choose between privacy and the supposed
| utility
| Barbing wrote:
| Right, while I understand the potential compute cost, it
| would be like the iPhone restricting the number of times you
| could use "allow once" for location permissions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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_
|
| This is probably the case. But Redmond being Redmond, they put
| their foot in their mouth by saying "you can only turn _off_
| this setting 3 times a year " (emphasis mine).
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| Agreed, in practice for me there's no real issue.
|
| But that's not necessarily true for everyone. And it doesn't
| need to be this way, either.
|
| For starters I think it'd help if we understood why they do
| this. I'm sure there's a cost to the compute MS spends on
| AI'ing all your photos, turning it off under privacy rules
| means you need to throw away that compute. And turning it back
| on creates an additional cost for MS, that they've already
| spent for nothing. Limiting that makes sense.
|
| What doesn't make sense is that I'd expect virtually nobody to
| turn it on and off over and over again, beyond 3 times, to the
| point that cost increases by more than a rounding error... like
| what type of user would do that, _and_ why would that type of
| user not be exceedingly rare?
|
| And even in that case, it'd make more sense to do it the other
| way around: you can turn on the feature 3 times per year, and
| off anytime. i.e. if you abuse it, you lose out on the feature,
| not your privacy.
|
| So I think it is an issue that could and should be quickly
| solved.
| a2128 wrote:
| If this is the true reason, then they have made some poor
| decisions throughout that still deserve criticism. Firstly by
| restricting the number of times you can turn it _off_ rather
| than _on_, secondly by not explaining the reason in the linked
| pages, and thirdly by having their publicist completely refuse
| to say a word on the matter.
|
| In fact, if you follow the linked page, you'll find a
| screenshot showing it was originally worded differently, "You
| can only change this setting 3 times a year" dating all the way
| back to 2023. So at some point someone made a conscious
| decision to change the wording to restrict the number of times
| you can turn it _off_
| CMay wrote:
| Maybe what they see is that most people who turn it off will
| leave it off, but some people turn it off and turn it back on
| as a part of a pattern/habit around temporarily putting files
| on OneDrive they don't want to scan.
|
| For example, people who don't use their encrypted vault on
| OneDrive, so they upload photos that should otherwise be
| encrypted to their normal OneDrive which gets scanned and
| tagged. It could be a photo of their driver's license, social
| security card, or something illicit.
|
| So these users toggle the tagging feature on and off during
| this time.
|
| Maybe the idea is to push these people's use case to the
| vault where it probably belongs?
| noir_lord wrote:
| > If you don't want the face recognition feature, then you'll
| turn it off once.
|
| The issue is that is a feature that 100% should in any sane
| world be opt _in_ - not _opt out_.
|
| Microsoft privacy settings are a case of - "It was on display
| in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused
| lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the
| Leopard."
| bapak wrote:
| There's inherently nothing wrong with face recognition, I
| love being able to search my own photos on my iPhone. If you
| could keep it private, you totally would too.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| Well, sometimes Microsoft decides to change your settings back.
| This has happened to me very frequently after installing
| Windows updates. I remember finding myself turning the same
| settings off time and again.
| netsharc wrote:
| The "fuck you, user!" behavior of software companies now
| means there's no more "No", only "Maybe later". Every time I
| update Google Photos, it shows me the screen that "Photos
| backups are not turned on! Turn on now?" (because they want
| to upsell their paid storage space option).
| jtmarl1n wrote:
| The lack of a true "no" option and only "maybe later"
| infuriates me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Silicon Valley companies are like a creepy guy in the
| nightclub going up to each woman and asking "Want to
| dance? [Yes] or [Ask Me Again]". The desperation is
| pathetic.
| duped wrote:
| I mean at this point I think it's really just utter
| incompetence over at Microsoft to design a system that can
| be updated without breaking it. They have never actually
| cared about solving that problem.
|
| If they had taste, someone opinionated over there would
| knock heads before shipping another version of windows that
| requires restarts or mutates user settings.
| netsharc wrote:
| A joke in the Windows 95 days was "You plugged in a
| mouse. Please restart your computer.". A few weeks ago I
| plugged in a Logitech wireless mouse receiver, Windows 10
| installed the drivers automatically, and finished with
| "To complete the installation of the software, please
| restart your computer"...
| anonymars wrote:
| It also now bugs me to do face scanning every so often too
|
| And unlike most things, both prompts require you to
| explicitly click some sort of "no", not just click away to
| dismiss. The backup one is particularly obnoxious because
| you have to flip a shitty little slider as the only button
| is "continue". Fuck. Off.
| kypro wrote:
| Assuming this reasoning is accurate, why not just silently
| throw a rate limit error and simply not reenable it if it's
| repeatedly switched on and off?
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to encrypt the index with a key
| that's copied to the user's device, and if the user wants to
| turn off this setting, delete the key on the server. When they
| want to turn it back on, the device uploads the key. Yes, the
| key might end up gone if there's a reinstall, etc.
|
| If the user leaves it off for a year, then delete the encrypted
| index from the server...
| bayindirh wrote:
| Even KDE's Digikam can run "somewhat expensive" algorithms on
| your photos without melting your PC and making you wait a year
| to recognize and label faces.
|
| Even my 10(?) year old iPhone X can do facial recognition and
| memory extraction on device while charging.
|
| My Sony A7-III can detect faces in real time, and discriminate
| it from 5 registered faces to do focus prioritization the
| moment I half-press the shutter.
|
| That thing will take mere minutes on Azure when batched and fed
| through GPUs.
|
| If my hunch is right, the option will have a "disable AI use
| for x months" slider and will turn itself on without letting
| you know. So you can't opt out of it completely, ever.
| like_any_other wrote:
| So why not limit how many times you can turn it _on_ , instead
| of off?
|
| We all know why.
| wzdd wrote:
| "When this feature is disabled, facial recognition will be
| disabled immediately and existing recognition data will be
| purged within 60 days". Then you don't need a creepy message.
| Okay, so that's 6 times a year, but whatever.
| bionhoward wrote:
| The point is it's sucking your data into some amorphous big
| brother dataset without explicitly asking you if you want that
| to happen first. Opt out AI features are generally rude,
| trashy, low-class, money grubbing data grabs
| pjc50 wrote:
| > what's the use case where you'd want to do this more than 3x
| per year?
|
| That means that all Microsoft has to do to get your consent to
| scan photos is turn the setting on every quarter.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Presumably, it 's somewhat expensive to run face recognition
| on all of your photos._
|
| Very likely true, but we shouldn't have to presume. If that's
| their motivation, they should state it clearly up front and
| make it opt-out by default. They can put a (?) callout on the
| UI for design decisions that have external constraints.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Seems obvious they actually mean to limit the number of times you
| can opt in. Very poor choice of words.
| mortehu wrote:
| The difference is whether you get locked into having it on or
| having it off at the end.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| There's a great solution to this.
|
| Just stop using Microsoft shit. It's a lot easier than untangling
| yourself from Google.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah it is legitimately hard to avoid Google, if nothing else
| some of your emails will probably be leaked to Gmail.
|
| But Microsoft is pretty easy to avoid after their decade of
| floundering.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Whenever I _have_ to use Windows, I just create a new
| throwaway account on proton, connect it to the mother
| throwaway account connected to a yahoo email account created
| in the before times, install what I need, and then never
| access that account again.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| It is fucked you almost need mob levels of burner cell
| precautions to have privacy and use Excel.
| khazhoux wrote:
| How can I play starcraft 2 without it?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Apparently it runs in Proton (I haven't tried it though).
| righthand wrote:
| Starcraft 2 w/ Battlenet has been working on Linux for over
| a decade. You don't even need Proton, it works lovely with
| WINE.
| sandblast wrote:
| Yes. Just use Immich for photos. AI scanning, but local and
| only opt-in.
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| you mean like stop using GitHub?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Yes, that too.
| archargelod wrote:
| Yes.
|
| For private repos there is Forgejo, Gitea and Gitlab.
|
| For open-source: Codeberg
|
| Yes, it'll make projects harder to discover, because you
| can't assume that "everything is on github" anymore. But it
| is a small price to pay for dignity.
| zahlman wrote:
| Why not put open-source projects on Gitlab?
| archargelod wrote:
| You can't create new account on Gitlab without a credit
| card (outside of EU and USA).
| zahlman wrote:
| Is there a free platform that will let me blog like GitHub
| Pages works?
| efreak wrote:
| Gitlab. Codeberg. Neocities. Nekoweb. Wasmer. Surge. Digital
| Ocean. Freehostia. Awardspace. 000webhost. Static.run.
| Kinsta. Cloudflare Pages. Render. Hostinger. Ionos. Bluehost.
| Firebase. Netlify. Orbiter. Heliohost. There's probably
| _hundreds_ of services with a free tier these days (though
| many of them will have strict limitations on website size and
| traffic, and you may have to run the build step locally).
| xigoi wrote:
| https://pico.sh/
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is such a norm in society now; PR tactics take priority
| over any notion of accountability, and most journalists and
| publishers act as stenographers, because challenging or even
| characterizing the PR line is treated as an unjustified attack
| and inflated claims of bias.
|
| Just as linking to original documents, court filings etc.
| should be a norm in news reporting, it should also be a norm to
| summarize PR responses (helpful, dismissive, evasive or
| whatever) and link to a summary of the PR text, rather than
| treating it as valid body copy.
| dandellion wrote:
| They take people for idiots. This can work a few times, but
| even someone who isn't the brightest will eventually put two
| and two together when they get screwed again and again and
| again.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| People need to treat PR like they do AIs. "You utterly failed
| to answer the question, try again and actually answer the
| question I asked this time." I'd love to see corporate
| representatives actually _pressed to answer_. "Did you
| actually do X, yes or no, if you dodge the question I'll
| present you as dodging the question and let people assume the
| worst."
| refulgentis wrote:
| Challenging or even characterizing the PR line is usually
| treated as an unjustified attack to justify inflated claims
| of bias.
| duped wrote:
| It's worse actually. These are repeated games so the
| outcome of any current interaction affects the next one.
| Journalists can't be too hard on the people the cover or
| else they won't have the access to cover them in the
| future.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| This is why I stopped watching American presidential
| "debates." If I wanted that kind of entertainment, I'd
| listen to a rap battle.
| pndy wrote:
| I'd guess that unlike AI a PR person would just simply stay
| silent or demand to continue with a different question or
| end the interview/talk and leave
| nosianu wrote:
| > _People need to treat PR like they do AIs. "You utterly
| failed to answer the question, try again and actually
| answer the question I asked this time._
|
| I'm going way off topic, and off on a tangent here.
|
| Anecdote, famous public broadcaster TV talk show in Germany
| (Markus Lanz): The invited politician failed to answer, so
| the host did what you asked. Three times. Then he just
| stopped and went to the next topic like nothing happened.
|
| For anyone thinking this is reasonable, what else could he
| have done, after all?
|
| This method is utterly useless for the public watching the
| dialog, but has benefits for both the show and the
| politician. The public won't learn a thing. The host can
| pretend to be super tough in evading guests. The politician
| is let off the hook very easily - he just have to deflect
| the question(s) with canned standard responses three times,
| easy enough, no consequences.
|
| Next day, the very critical people on reddit wrote highly
| upvoted comments celebrating how "tough" the host was on
| the politician.
|
| But the whole scenario is always the same, every single
| time, almost like it's scripted: The guest only has to
| deflect the "tough" question a few times and then nothing
| else happens, they just move on. It's also eerie to see the
| change in the host and their questions, from acting tough
| three times to changing back to acting amiably and
| forgetting about the unanswered question.
|
| At this point this is all just part of the "act tough but
| don't upset the guest" show.
|
| You may ask, but what can they do?
|
| Well, how about throwing the guy out? What's the use of
| them as an interview partner if the interview is used as a
| mere PR piece? They should just have replacement guests on
| standby. That won't be a high-level person, but it does not
| need to be. Yes, they will have trouble getting politicians
| in if they have to fear actually having to answer. So what?
| Is the show being a one-sided PR piece any better? They
| could just interview normal non-Berlin-politics-bubble
| people instead. There are soooo many who have interesting
| things to say, much more interesting than some politician's
| prepared statements.
|
| Unless there are actual consequences, like ending the
| interview right there and letting the viewers or readers
| know that answers were refused, acting tough does not
| matter if it can just be waited out.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > The guest only has to deflect the "tough" question a
| few times and then nothing else happens, they just move
| on.
|
| How about 12 times? See BBC News's Jeremy Paxman
| interview with Michael Howard -
| https://youtu.be/IqU77I40mS0?si=NpW7cSqi2eXsQt8s
| delfinom wrote:
| It's not just PR tactics for the sake of accountability. It's
| because there's a glut of lawyers that'll sue for the tinest
| admission of anything.
| bregma wrote:
| Flip side is there is a glut of lawyers who will sue for
| the tiniest bit of negative reporting under slander or
| libel laws. Next thing you know media corporations are
| sending emoluments to the highest authorities just for
| reporting facts like what was said in election campaigns.
|
| Modern reporting is tricky because there are hungry sharks
| circling all sides.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _link to a summary of the PR text_
|
| Should have just said 'link to a screenshot of the PR text',
| apologies for the confusion
| quitit wrote:
| They prevaricated all of their answers, and that itself is far
| more telling.
| zipy124 wrote:
| The worst part of all this is even respectable news
| organisations like the BBC publish so many articles that are
| just the companies PR response verbatim. Even worse when it's
| like
|
| - victim says hi, this thing is messed up and people need to
| know about this
|
| -Company says "bla bla bla" legal speak we don't recognise an
| issue "bla bla bla"
|
| End of article, instead of saying
|
| "This comment doesn't seem to reflect the situation" or other
| pointing out that anybody with a brain can see the two
| statements are not equal in evidence nor truth
| LunaSea wrote:
| 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.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I think the EU is flawed in more ways that just one. But every
| time I see ,,<AI feature> will be available starting now
| outside EU" I am really grateful
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I've never seen a better case for uploading endless AI slop
| photos.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I think a call to Australia's privacy commissioner might be in
| order.
| globalnode wrote:
| What are they gonna do? Hard to have a convo with your master
| when youre on your knees...
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Well put.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| And not just advertising. If ICE asks Microsoft to identify
| accounts of people who have uploaded a photo of "Person X", do
| you think they're going to decline?
|
| They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant.
|
| I'd bet Microsoft is doing this more because of threats from
| USG than because of advertising revenue.
| einpoklum wrote:
| ICE don't have to ask for anything, the USG gets a copy of
| all data Microsoft collects from you, anyway. Remember:
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-10-most-disturbing-snowden-
| re...
| zzgo wrote:
| > They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant
|
| I'm old enough to remember when companies were tripping over
| themselves after 9/11 trying to give the government anything
| they could to help them keep an eye on Americans. They
| eventually learned to monetize this, and now we have the
| surveillance economy.
| cube00 wrote:
| > They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant.
|
| ...and build them a nice portal to submit their requests and
| get the results back in real time.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I don't understand how america works, but surely Microsoft
| isn't paid for data requested by whatever agency?
| smileson2 wrote:
| 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
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Money and power. Who was the first BigTech co on the Prism
| slides? Who muscled out competitors in the 90s?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They never changed. For some reason Satya became CEO and nerds
| fawned over the "new Microsoft" for whatever reason.
|
| They are a hard nosed company focused with precision on
| dominance for themselves.
| uep wrote:
| Do we even think that was real? I think social media has been
| astroturfed for a long time now. If enough people make those
| claims, it starts to feel true even without evidence to
| support it.
|
| Did they ever open source anything that really make you think
| "wow"? The best I could see was them "embracing" Linux, but
| embrace, extend, extinguish was always a core part of their
| strategy.
| charles_f wrote:
| Insider here, in m365 though not onedrive. It did change, but
| not because of satya ; because of rules and legislation and
| bad press. Privacy and security are taken very seriously (at
| least by people who care to follow internal rules) not
| because "we're nice", but because
|
| - EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our
| toes, do things by the book, and be auditable - it's bad
| press when we get caught doing garbage like that. And bad
| press is bad for business
|
| In my org, doing anything with customer's data that isn't
| directly bringing _them_ value is theoretically not possible.
| You can 't deliver anything that isn't approved by privacy.
|
| Don't forget that this is a very big company. It's composed
| of people who actually care and want to do the right thing,
| people who don't really care and just want to ship and would
| rather not be impeded by compliance processes, and people who
| are actually trying to bypass these processes because they'd
| sell your soul for a couple bucks if they could. For the
| little people like me, the official stance is that we should
| care about privacy very much.
|
| Our respect for privacy was one of the main reasons I'm still
| there. There has been a good period of time where the actual
| sentiment was "we're the good guys", especially when
| comparing to google and Facebook. A solid portion of that was
| that our revenue was driven by subscriptions rather than ads.
| I guess the appeal to take customer's money _and_ exploit
| their data is too big. The kind of shit that will get me to
| leave.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Our respect for privacy was one of the main reasons I'm
| still there. There has been a good period of time where the
| actual sentiment was "we're the good guys", especially when
| comparing to google and Facebook. A solid portion of that
| was that our revenue was driven by subscriptions rather
| than ads.
|
| How long has MS been putting ads in the start menu?
| MYEUHD wrote:
| 10 years
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393812
| odo1242 wrote:
| As he said, very heterogeneous company.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Sure, but "there has been a good period of time where..."
| is a statement that the situation introduced by _where_
| continues into the present. And that doesn 't seem to be
| compatible with the facts.
| vee-kay wrote:
| I have a suspicion that Satya Nadella himself doesn't use
| Windows 11, otherwise he would have fired the team that
| messed up the Start Menu and he would have banned all ads
| from start menu and desktop.
|
| Even Bill Gates dumped the Windows Phone and switched to
| Android (he prefers the Samsung Galaxy Fold4)
|
| https://www.gearbrain.com/bill-gates-windows-phone-
| android-2...
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our
| toes, do things by the book
|
| Erm, dude ....
|
| IANAL, and I am sure most people do not need to be lawyers
| to figure out that not allowing people to _permanently_
| opt-out of photo scanning is almost certainly going to be
| in contravention of every EU law in the book.
|
| I hope the EU take Microsoft to the cleaners over this one.
| charles_f wrote:
| That's my point. I wish the company would only be
| composed of people who not only do things by the book,
| but also do the _right_ thing. This kind of borderline
| (or across the border) garbage renders nil everyone else
| 's efforts to be exemplary, poison the well of some sort.
| I'm not sure why they force you to scan photos, if I
| assume best intentions hopefully that's just that they
| really want you to use the feature ; but having met
| product managers with actual nefarious intents who wanted
| to find ways of circumventing the rules, there's a chance
| that it's a problem.
|
| I understand that the company doesn't get the benefit of
| the doubt in such situations, especially when publicists
| "choose not to answer" why this feature is done like
| that. Great job there...
|
| I'm also hoping we get a correction, be it the EU or just
| PR backlash. As I said, this is the kind of shit that
| makes me not want to have my name associated with the
| company.
| quitit wrote:
| This week I have received numerous reminders from Microsoft to
| renew my Skype credit..
|
| Everything I see from that company is farcical. Massive
| security lapses, lazy AI features with huge privacy flaws,
| steamrolling OS updates that add no value whatsoever, and
| heavily relying on their old playbook of just buying anything
| that looks like it could disrupt them.
|
| P.S. The skype acquisition was $8.5B in 2011 (That's $12.24B in
| today's money.)
| yuliyp wrote:
| I don't understand how this is losing their mind. Toggling this
| setting is expensive on the backend: opting in means "go and
| rescan all the photos". opting out means "delete all the
| scanned information for this user". As a user just make up your
| mind and set the setting. They let you opt in, they ley you opt
| out, they just don't want to let you trigger tons of work every
| minute.
| xigoi wrote:
| If this was the case, they would leave it in the off state
| after you run out of toggles. The reality is that it will
| magically turn on every month.
| chanux wrote:
| There was a time with a strong sentiment of Satya Nadella
| making MS great again.
|
| Oh what time does to things!
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Microsoft in the past few years has totally lost it's mind
|
| I don't know what this Microsoft thing is that you speak of. I
| only know a company called Copilot Prime.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| They are like shitty Midas, everything they touch, turns into
| pile of crap. However people stil buy their products. They
| think the turd is tasty, because billion of flies can't we
| wrong...
|
| Meanwhile Apple is applying different set of toxic patterns.
| Lack of interoperability with other OS, their apps try to store
| data mainly on iCloud, iPhone has no jack connector etc.
| buyucu wrote:
| Microsoft wants money. Microsoft does not care about you.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| CEO v3.0 Satya is the reason. He can't innovate, he can only
| play 'chase the leader'
| exe34 wrote:
| Makes me want to download and install windows, and store a
| picture of my hairy brown nutsack with googly eyes on it.
| The_President wrote:
| Cue Nair and football season ads
| correlator wrote:
| 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?
| d-sky wrote:
| In that case, they should make it the other way around -- you
| can enable this only three times a year.
| ok_dad wrote:
| They should do it the other direction, then: if you turn it off
| more than three times you can't turn it back on.
| margalabargala wrote:
| But that's less good for profit. Why would they give up money
| for morals?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Esp. when you can just eat money to survive when you
| relocate to the Mars, no?
| alterom wrote:
| >Does this mean that when you disable, all labels are deleted
|
| AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
|
| Ha.
|
| Nice one.
| xigoi wrote:
| It's like expecting a lion to stop eating you if you ask it
| politely.
| dandellion wrote:
| No, it's a profit-seeking measure.
| ptrl600 wrote:
| Presumably you just need to turn it off once, right?
| anarticle wrote:
| Year of the Linux desktop edges ever closer.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| There is a big rationale behind it. If their AI investments
| don't pan out, Microsoft will cease to exist. They've been out
| of ideas since the late 90s. They know that the subscription
| gravy train has already peaked. There is no more growth unless
| they fabricate new problems for which they will then force you
| to pay for the solution to the problem they created for you.
| Oh, your children were kidnapped because Microsoft sold their
| recognition and location data to kidnappers? Well you should
| have paid for Microsoft's identity protection E7 plus add-on
| subscription that prevents them from selling the data you did
| not authorize them to collect to entities that they should know
| better than to deal with.
| nbngeorcjhe wrote:
| I don't even get why they would need "ideas" or "growth" tbh.
| They have most popular desktop operating system, they have
| one of the most popular office suites, surely they make
| plenty of profit from those. If they just focused on making
| their existing products not shit they would remain a
| profitable company indefinitely. But instead they're
| enshittifying everything because they want more More MORE
| Ekaros wrote:
| Because there are too many people chasing of ever going up
| line on valuation chart. It is simply not acceptable
| anymore to have reasonable business that generates solid
| dividends and grows with opening markets and population.
| Blame the silicon valley, VC and like...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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).
| bigbuppo wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| 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).
| ghssds wrote:
| Do you remember this: http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html ?
|
| Microsoft hate was something else in the '90s and 2000s. Yet
| people stayed with it as if they had no choice while OS/2,
| AmigaOS, NextStep, BeOS and all those UNIXes died.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| an employer requires their workers to use Windows; the target
| audience for Windows is management, their HR and attorneys,
| and then greater security services. MSFT sells investigative
| services.
| EasyMark wrote:
| A lot of people didn't and still don't. Sometimes your
| job/business requires certain software that is only available
| on windows. I'm not giving up my job for an OS. for the past
| 15 years or so I could do everything on Mac and Linux, but
| that might not always be the case. I certainly wouldn't pass
| up a lucrative consulting position because it was windows
| only.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Back then people really didn't have much of a choice.
|
| Nowadays most things happen in browsers anyways, WINE/Proton
| have come a long way, and alternatives to almost anything
| windows-only have reached a critical quality threshold.
| chrsw wrote:
| >unless their jobs gives them one
|
| Microsoft knows the vast majority of professionals are forced
| to use their products and services or else they can't put food
| on the table. That's why Microsoft can operate with near
| impunity.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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.
| gessha wrote:
| This made me look up if you can disable iOS photo scanning and
| you can't. Hmm.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.]
| yencabulator wrote:
| Reminder: Microsoft owns Github and NPM.
| christophilus wrote:
| Fedora with vanilla Gnome is excellent for anyone looking for an
| alternative.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| If you opt out and then never turn it back on, you have opted
| out.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Because Microsoft is known to respect user settings between
| (forced) Windows Updates and not turn stuff back on...
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| > It's not hard to guess the problem: toggling the feature off
| and then on would trigger a rescan of every photo in the
| library.
|
| That's would be a wild way to implement this feature.
|
| I mean it's Microsoft so I wouldn't be surprised if it was done
| in the dumbest way possible but god damn this would be such a
| dumb way to implement this feature.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This would be because of the legal requirement to purge
| (erase) all the previous scan data once a user opts out. So
| the only way to re-enable is to scan everything again --
| unless you have some clever way I've not thought of?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| In theory, you could store a private key on the device and
| cryptoshred the data on Microsoft's servers when the
| setting is disabled (Microsoft deletes their copy of the
| key). Then, when the feature is re-enabled, upload the
| private key to Microsoft again.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Does that meet the legal requirement to delete data when
| requested? I am not sure it does.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| As far as I know, most data protection laws accept
| cryptoshredding as long as the party with a deletion
| requirement actually destroys the key. For one thing,
| it's hard to reconcile deletion requirements with
| immutable architectures and backups without a mechanism
| like this.
|
| IANAL, but I think the key remaining in the user's
| possession doesn't matter as far as the company with a
| deletion requirement is concerned.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| If the key remains on the users device but under the
| control of the app, does that count as out of control of
| the app?
|
| Maybe you'd have to force the user to export the key to
| an external file (and forget the path) or encrypt it with
| some mechanism that the app isn't in control of.
| zaik wrote:
| Encrypt the data and store the key on the user's device. If
| the user enables the feature, they transmit their key to
| you. If they disable the feature, you delete the key on
| your side.
| godelski wrote:
| You do not have to, and should not, start deleting data
| immediately. We've not uncivilized here, we can schedule
| tasks.
|
| If this were happening on device (lol) then you should do
| both the scanning and deleting operations at times of
| usually low activity. Just like how you schedule updates
| (though Microsoft seems to not have forgotten how to do
| this). Otherwise, doing the operations at toggle time just
| slams the user's computer, which is a great way to get them
| to turn it off! We'd especially want the process to have
| high niceness and be able to pause itself to not hinder the
| user. Make sure they're connected to power or at least
| above some threshold in battery if on laptop.
|
| If you can on device and upload, again, you should do this
| at times of low activity. But you also are not going to be
| deleting data right away because that is going to be held
| across several servers. That migration takes time. There's
| a reason your Google Takeout can take a few hours and why
| companies like Facebook say your data might still be
| recoverable for 90 days.
|
| Doing so immediately also creates lots of problems. Let's
| say you enable, let it go for awhile, then just toggle back
| and fourth like a mad man. Does your toggling send the halt
| signal to the scanning operation? What does the toggling on
| option do? Do you really think this is going to happen
| smoothly without things stepping on each other? You're
| setting yourself up for a situation where the program is
| both scanning and deleting at the same time. If this is
| implemented better than most things I've seen from
| Microsoft then this will certainly happen and you'll be in
| an infinite loop. All because you make the assumption that
| there is no such thing, or the possibility of, an orphaned
| process. You just pray that these junior programmers with a
| senior title just don't know how to do parallelization...
|
| In addition to the delay you should be marking the images
| in a database to create a queue. Store the hash of the file
| as the ID and mark appropriately. We are queuing our
| operations and we want to have fail safes. You're scanning
| the entire fucking computer so you don't want to do things
| haphazardly! Go ahead, take a "move fast and break things"
| approach, and watch your customers' get a blue screen of
| death and wake up to having their hard drives borked.
| > unless you have some clever way I've not thought of?
|
| Seriously, just sit down and think about the problem before
| you start programming. The whiteboard or pen and paper are
| some of your most important weapons as a programmer. Your
| first solution will be shit and that's okay. Your second
| and even third solution might be shit too. But there's a
| reason you need depth. We haven't even gotten into any real
| depth here either. Our "solution" here has no depth, it's
| just the surface level and I'm certain the first go will be
| shit. And But you'll figure more stuff out and find more
| problems and fix them. I'm also certain others will present
| other ideas that can be used too. Yay, collaboration! It's
| all good unless you just pretend you're done and problems
| don't exist anymore. (Look ma! All the tests pass! We're
| bug free!) For christ's sake, what are you getting a
| quarter million+ salary for?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Disabling the feature would purge the data. That's the
| intent.
|
| If disabling the feature _kept_ the data, that would be a
| real problem.
|
| I don't know why you think it's dumb that they purge the data
| when you turn a feature off. That's what you want.
| incompatible wrote:
| > Turn the switch off, leave it off, and it's not a problem.
|
| Assuming that it doesn't mysteriously (due to some error or
| update, no doubt) move back to the on position by itself.
| technofiend wrote:
| I cancelled Facebook in part due to a tug-of-war over privacy
| defaults. They kept getting updated with some corporate
| pablum about how opting in benefited the user. It was just
| easier to permanently opt out via account deletion rather
| than keep toggling the options. I have no doubt Microsoft
| will do the same. I'm wiping my Windows partition and loading
| Steam OS or some variant and dual booting into some TBD Linux
| distro for development.
|
| When I truly need Windows, I have an ARM VM in Parallels.
| Right now it gets used once a year at tax time.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Is Linux tax software really that bad?
| api wrote:
| I thought most tax software was now web based SaaS.
| taurath wrote:
| Oh the one you toggle will be off.
|
| But tomorrow they'll add a new feature, with a different
| toggle, that does the same thing but will be distinct enough.
| That toggle will default on, and you'll find it in a year and
| a half after it's been active.
|
| Control over your data is an illusion. The US economy is
| built upon corporations mining your data. That's why ML
| engineers got to buy houses in the 2010s, and it's why ML/AI
| engineers get to buy houses in the 2020s.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I agree this is a concern, but it frustrates me that tech
| companies won't give us reasonable options.
|
| - "Scan photos I upload" yes/no. No batch processing needed,
| only affects photos from now on.
|
| - "Delete all scans (15,101)" if you are privacy conscious
|
| - "Scan all missing photos (1,226)" can only be done 3x per
| year
|
| "But users are dummies who cannot understand anything!" Not
| with that attitude they can't.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > - "Scan photos I upload" yes/no. No batch processing
| needed, only affects photos from now on.
|
| This would create a situation where some of the photos have
| tags and some don't. Users would forget why the behavior is
| different across their library.
|
| Their solution? Google it and start trying random
| suggestions. Toggle it all on and off. Delete everything and
| start over with rescanning. This gets back to the exact
| problem they're trying to avoid.
|
| > - "Scan all missing photos (1,226)" can only be done 3x per
| year
|
| There is virtually no real world use case where someone would
| want to stop scanning new photos but also scan all photos but
| only when they remember to press this specific button. The
| number of users who would get confused and find themselves in
| unexpected states of half-scanned libraries would outweigh
| the number of intentional uses of this feature by 1000:1 or
| more.
| nativeit wrote:
| Tell you what, Microsoft: turn it off, leave it off, remove it,
| fire the developers who made it, forget you ever had the idea.
| Bet that saved some processing power?
| htk wrote:
| Most of us wouldn't mind if the limitation was that you can't
| opt IN more than 3 times/year, but of course Microsoft dark
| patterned it to limit the opt outs.
| Nition wrote:
| 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?
| staviette wrote:
| I think - at least for the people who stick with a career in PR
| - that they enjoy playing the game of giving an answer that is
| sort of related to the question but doesn't actually give a
| single bit of useful information. That they enjoy seeing how
| far they can push it without the interviewer straight up accuse
| them of not answering the question.
|
| At least that's the only way I can imagine them keeping their
| sanity.
| bapak wrote:
| It's in their job description, they're most likely very proud
| of how their words can swindle the majority. They're greasy and
| they love it.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I think HN skews towards a somewhat naive but good natured
| crowd. Every time ethics or morality comes up on here there
| is no shortage of defenders that simply don't want to accept
| the fact. Yes there are bad people out there that are not
| only ok with the bad things they do but even some that
| actively enjoy it and pursue more of it.
| Nition wrote:
| Well, I'll admit that I hadn't even really thought of the
| option where they know it's evil but they just _enjoy_ it
| until these responses. I figured they 'd either hate their
| job or have convinced themselves that they're actually
| doing good. To be fair I think a lot of outwardly-evil
| people have convinced themselves internally that they're
| good people.
| xigoi wrote:
| Stop anthropomorphizing Microsoft PR speakers.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| mkrishnan wrote:
| fuck microsoft
| The_President wrote:
| Micro Soft Windows
|
| With a name like that who needs gravity.
| getnormality wrote:
| > 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!
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| 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?"
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| By each passing day since I switched from using Windows to Linux
| at home, with decreasing friction, I am increasingly happy that I
| took time to learn Linux and stuck with it. This not a come to
| Linux call because I know it is easier said than done for most of
| non technical folks. But it is a testimony that if you do, the
| challenges eventually will be worth it. Because at this point,
| Microsoft is just openly insulting their captive users.
| lstodd wrote:
| You know, in 90s in Russia in IT circles Windows was known as
| "mazdai" which is a transliteration of "must die".
|
| Looks like nothing has changed.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| Microsoft's understanding of consent is about on-par with that of
| a rapist.
| The_President wrote:
| I say this about advertising and after recently using Win11 for
| the first time to remove malware, I was left with a gross
| feeling. My friend whose computer it was is not highly PC
| literate, but when I was talking about the AI shit built in to
| these platforms, you could see the disgust building.
| resheku wrote:
| EU please whack them and whack them good
| yupyupyups wrote:
| You should ask the EU what happed with the Digital Markets Act,
| and if it's possible to install arbitrary software on an iPhone
| today. If the answer is "no, you can't", then that should give
| you a hint of how effective the EU really is when it comes to
| these issues.
| dsign wrote:
| Microsoft gets most of its money from big corporate customers.
| Some of those customers are obligated by law to not leak
| sensitive personal data to servers in USA soil, because those
| customers have the missfortune of being in countries with strong
| privacy laws, functioning civil societies and sometimes even
| left-winged governments. I know for a fact that the product in
| question, "OneDrive", it's sometimes mandated in those companies
| as a backup solution for the company's computers. All it takes is
| a whistle-blowing incident or a chat with a journalist for this
| to become a major blow-up for Microsoft, with companies forced by
| tribunals to back off from contracts with Microsoft.
| mbf1 wrote:
| I wonder if you can write a program to make pictures with face
| tattoos be the normal for Microsoft AI to train on, like see if
| enough people did this, if Microsoft's facial recognition started
| generating lots of face tats...
| mk89 wrote:
| So the message is: if you can, don't use OneDrive.
|
| If you can't (work, etc.) try to avoid uploading sensitive
| documents in onedrive.
|
| I always wondered who uses OneDrive for cloud storage. Hell, I
| think even Google Drive is better.
|
| Microsoft has really pivoted to AI for all things. I wonder how
| many customers they will get vs how many they will lose due to
| this very invasive way of doing things.
| buyucu wrote:
| This is your daily reminder not to use Microsoft.
| teekert wrote:
| "It's not your data citizen, you should be happy we made this OS
| for you. You are not smart enough to do it your self, we know
| what is best."
|
| I can never help myself from hearing this inside, and am just
| incredibly thankful that we have Linux and FOSS in general. That
| really gives me hope for humanity at this point.
|
| I type this in FireFox, on NixOS, with all my pics open in
| another tab, in Immich. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
| Lio wrote:
| This sounds like the next level of the nauseating "maybe later".
|
| i.e. You'll do what we tell you eventually.
| ajrouvoet wrote:
| Meta just lost a court case against bits of freedom in the
| Netherlands, because their instagram setting to turn off the
| attention grabbing feed would reset every month or so. The court
| ruled that this infringed on the user's freedom.
|
| Source: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/court-tells-meta-to-
| give-du...
| immibis wrote:
| 503 service unavailable - did Slashdot get HNed? Ironic.
| (Probably not - it's probably unrelated)
| lawcomingfyms wrote:
| What happens to the faces in photos that do not belong to the
| photo owner?
|
| Do they get scanned as well without the person's permission?
| taylorius wrote:
| It's enough to make a man consider Linux...
| api wrote:
| Why does anyone still run Windows?
|
| Games I guess.
|
| Both Mac and Linux desktop/laptop machines are better and less
| loaded with shit. If you don't need or want a full featured PC
| you have Android and iOS which are also better. Android you have
| to be careful of but if you pick well it can be customizable and
| less loaded with shit.
|
| Steam is available for both Linux and macOS. Are there just not
| as many game titles? I just saw Cyberpunk show up in the Apple
| Store for Mac so there seems to be an effort to port more games
| off Windows.
|
| I have a Windows VM but use it less and less. Only need now is to
| test and build some software for Windows.
|
| Also: I realized what I do kind of like about Apple and how best
| to describe their ecosystem. It's the devil you know. They are
| fairly consistent in their policies and they are better on
| privacy than others. Some of their policies suck, but they suck
| in known consistent ways.
|
| If I left Apple, Linux (probably on Framework) is the only
| alternative.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > Why does anyone still run Windows? > Games I guess.
|
| Music, and video.
| drumhead wrote:
| We created this oligopoly because they were convenient, free,
| powerful, and now its time for us to pay the price.
|
| Or find services that may not be as easy to use, may cost
| something and may not have all the features you want, but which
| wont make unreasonable demands for your data.
|
| In light of the way the US government is carrying on, I'd rather
| not give Microsoft any of my images.
| superkuh wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised that it is Microsoft leading the field in
| this. It seems like something that'd be much more at home on an
| Apple or Google smartphone. But I suppose smartphones don't have
| the hardware or network power or resources to pull this off
| without noticibly degrading the smartphone performance.
| r0b05 wrote:
| Disabling offline accounts is one thing but scanning and labeling
| your files to profile users is a whole other can of worms. This
| trajectory leads to zero privacy for the user and I feel like
| switching to Linux/Mac will be the only option sadly.
| ziofill wrote:
| Slashdot: why opt-out rather than opt-in?
|
| Microsoft: it's just a shit as Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
| unixhero wrote:
| To believe I was paying for this yearly
|
| Unbelievable
| sombragris wrote:
| Obviously the whole point is to make AI overreach avoidance as
| painful as possible.
|
| Of course, that's also the reason why Lens was deprecated despite
| being a good, useful app, forcing one to deal with the bload of
| Copilot 365.
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