4 ms·
The biggest issue: you cannot not give them your personal data that they then loose. Let me contribute with an anecdote from yesterday (slightly off-topic but
by prennert 5y ago
The biggest issue: you cannot not give them your personal data that they then loose.
Let me contribute with an anecdote from yesterday (slightly off-topic but I promise to get around to it at the end). So just yesterday I needed to create a Microsoft account to try out Teams which is supposedly free. (I have avoided it so far, but my GF has been asked to use it for an interview and we wanted to do a tech test run before). Of course, the UI on the website assumes (!) that you already have a Microsoft account. It will let you create a Teams account that will fail the login if you do not have a Microsoft account and then sends you around in a Byzantine loop without telling you: Look you need a Microsoft account to use Teams. It looks to me as it just creates a shallow alias or something without root reference. This is dark patterns all over the place.
Anyway, a bit more on topic, I am course using my spam email for this account, but then they ask for my phone number. This is really an issue, because except if I get a burner phone, my personal data is linked with an account of a company I do not trust. After witnessing then how bad teams is almost 1.5 years after everyone is working remotely, (wow their web client does not allow you to share webcam and a window/screen at the same time, while their native client makes it super hard to share content while still seeing the people who you present to), I realised
1. How privileged I am not having to use Microsoft products (need to remember to charge extra, whenever asks me do a job that involves Microsoft products)
2. How anti-competitive Microsoft still is (you cannot login to Teams, MS web auth, in Chromium incognito mode, and it needs a ton of cookie domains whitelisted, even then it does not work)
3. How (and this is not Microsoft specific) difficult it is to not hand over personal data to companies that provide a utility-like service that they pretend is free (so everybody can pretend they are inclusive when they use these services)
4. An then literally a day later it turns out I am not paranoid not trusting Microsoft (and I guess other companies, big or small) with my data, because they are going to loose it sooner or later.
Edit: I just logged back into this MS account. They dont even use the phone number as "2FA". They only send you a text when you register, not for subsequent logins. It looks to me as they just collect it to make sure they really have some personal data to loose..
- canadaduane 5y agoThe generous interpretation is that they need a way to give people something free while avoiding giving bots/spammers something free. You could point to CAPTCHA as a way to do this anonymously, but as far as I can tell, CAPTCHA has largely been broken by successful machine learning algos (most of the web scraping services I have seen offer "free CAPTCHA defeat" as a perk of buying their service).
- jolmg 5y agoI wouldn't do this if it were just a typo, but since you did it multiple times, I thought I should inform you that you mean "lose", not "loose".
- mr_toad 5y agoMicrosoft authentication is terrible. It breaks at random times with misleading error messages (telling you that TFA failed for example, when in fact it’s one of their servers is down). Sometimes it just times out or goes into a loop until you close the page or clear cookies. And authentication for teams on Safari doesn’t work at all, even though the rest of Office works fine.