Comment by CMay
3 days ago
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.
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.
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.