Comment by landl0rd
3 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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How are they not legally liable for that?
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.
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Microsoft crossed that line so many years ago with their constant re-enabling without consent all the various anti-privacy stuff during upgrades.
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.
> I wouldn't assume this was intentionally evil bad faith.
Then you are hopelessly naive.