Comment by jonas21

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_

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.

> 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.”

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.

> 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).

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.

> 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.

So why not limit how many times you can turn it on, instead of off?

We all know why.

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

To prevent you from having the option to temporarily disable it, so you have to choose between privacy and the supposed utility

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.

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?

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...

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 )(&(/&(%)?????!?!??"

"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.