Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
3 days ago
<< 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.
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/copilo...
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.