Comment by NoLinkToMe

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.