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Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year
- _wire_ 1y agoCrossposting slashdot? Heaven forfend!
- dmitrygr 1y agoThey are the ones who did this interview
- leakycap 1y agoMicrosoft: forces OneDrive on users via dark pattern dialogs that many users just accept Users: save files "on their PC" (they think) Microsoft: Rolls out AI photo-scanning feature to unknowing users intending to learn something. Users: WTF? And there are rules on turning it on and off? Microsoft: We have nothing more to share at this time. Favorite quote from the article: > [Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]
- netsharc 1y agoTell them "you may only refuse to answer this question 3 times a year".
- j45 1y agoIt's totally worth self hosting files, it's gotten much better.
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoAlmost feel like we are getting to class action or antitrust when you connect the dots. Almost all PCs come with Windows. Defacto you need to create a M$ account to use Windows locally. They opt you into one drive by default. They sync your docs by default. They upload all your photos into AI by default.
- queuebert 1y agoYou can use Windows without a Microsoft account, but the dark pattern to do this is very difficult to navigate.
- leakycap 1y agoSounds like this advice will be expiring along with the next Windows update, so if you want a local account your window of opportunity may be closing. (What happens when you need to get a new PC?)
- kevin_b_er 1y agoBy "class action" I presume you're referring to the US. If so, no, the courts of law are forbidden to you. You will instead go to a secret tribunal where the laws do not matter. The arbiter will only continue to be paid if they continue to rule for corporations. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement#15_bindingArbitration https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement#15_binding...
- account42 1y agoNot everything that a company lawyer writes in text is actually legally binding.
- rf15 1y ago> and follow Microsoft's compliance with General Data Protection Regulation Not in a million years. See you in court. As often, just because a press statement says something, it's not necessarily true and maybe only used to defuse public perception.
- thrownfjfkfmofn 1y agoHow is this not a revenge porn or something? If I upload sensitive photos somewhere, it is 5 years prison sentence! CEO of Microsoft can do that billion times!
- The_President 1y agoSecurity issue for targeted people. What if an MS account gets compromised and a bad actor plants illegal material on the computer that is then scanned by the cloud before it is caught.
- themafia 1y ago"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year." Astonishing. They clearly feel their users have no choice but to accept this onerous and ridiculous requirement. As if users wouldn't understand that they'd have to go way out of their way to write the code which enforces this outcome. All for a feature which provides me dubious benefit. I know who the people in my photographs are. Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this? Privacy legislation is clearly lacking. This type of action should bring the hammer down swiftly and soundly upon these gross and inappropriate corporate decision makers. Microsoft has needed that hammer blow for quite some time now. This should make that obvious. I guess I'll hold my breath while I see how Congress responds.
- mihaaly 1y agoI assume this would be a ... call it feature for now, so a feature not available in the EU due to GDPR violations.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jaredsohn 1y ago> I know who the people in my photographs are. Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this? Presumably it can be used for filtering as well - find me all pictures of me with my dad, etc.
- wkat4242 1y agoSure but if it was for your benefit, not theirs, they wouldn't force it on you.
- themafia 1y agoPrecisely. The logic could just as easily be "you can only turn this ON three times a year." You should be able to turn it off as many times as you want and no hidden counter should prevent you from doing so.
- jonas21 1y agoI don't really see the issue. If you don't want the face recognition feature, then you'll turn it off once, and that's that. Maybe if you're unsure, you might turn it off, and then back on, and then back off again. But what's the use case where you'd want to do this more than 3x per year? Presumably, it's somewhat expensive to run face recognition on all of your photos. When you turn it off, they have to throw away the index (they'd better be doing this for privacy reasons), and then rebuild it from scratch when you turn the feature on again.
- gus_massa 1y agoHow hard it to turn it on? Does it show a confirmation message? My wife has a phone with a button on the side that opens the microphone to ask questions to Google. I guess 90% of the audios they get are "How the /&%/&#"% do I close this )(&(/&(%)?????!?!??"
- xdfgh1112 1y agoI bought a new Motorola phone and there are no less than three ways to open Google assistant (side button, hold home button, swipe from corner). Took me about 10 seconds before I triggered it unintentionally and quickly figured out how to disable all of them...
- ArnoVW 1y agoTo prevent you from having the option to temporarily disable it, so you have to choose between privacy and the supposed utility
- Barbing 1y agoRight, while I understand the potential compute cost, it would be like the iPhone restricting the number of times you could use “allow once“ for location permissions.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> When you turn it off, they have to throw away the index (they'd better be doing this for privacy reasons), and then rebuild it from scratch when you turn the feature on again This is probably the case. But Redmond being Redmond, they put their foot in their mouth by saying "you can only turn off this setting 3 times a year" (emphasis mine).
- fancyfredbot 1y agoSeems obvious they actually mean to limit the number of times you can opt in. Very poor choice of words.
- mortehu 1y agoThe difference is whether you get locked into having it on or having it off at the end.
- surgical_fire 1y agoThere's a great solution to this. Just stop using Microsoft shit. It's a lot easier than untangling yourself from Google.
- bee_rider 1y agoYeah it is legitimately hard to avoid Google, if nothing else some of your emails will probably be leaked to Gmail. But Microsoft is pretty easy to avoid after their decade of floundering.
- LogicFailsMe 1y agoWhenever I have to use Windows, I just create a new throwaway account on proton, connect it to the mother throwaway account connected to a yahoo email account created in the before times, install what I need, and then never access that account again.
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoIt is fucked you almost need mob levels of burner cell precautions to have privacy and use Excel.
- khazhoux 1y agoHow can I play starcraft 2 without it?
- fishmicrowaver 1y agoI was quite happy for a couple years to just use windows and wsl. Fully switched to Linux at home and Linux VM's at work. The thirst and desperation to make AI work gives me the creeps more than usual.
- bayindirh 1y agoDid anyone notice that Microsoft never replied any of the asked questions, but deflected them? They are exactly where I left them 20 years ago. It's very sad that I can't stop using them again for doing this.
- anigbrowl 1y agoThis is such a norm in society now; PR tactics take priority over any notion of accountability, and most journalists and publishers act as stenographers, because challenging or even characterizing the PR line is treated as an unjustified attack and inflated claims of bias. Just as linking to original documents, court filings etc. should be a norm in news reporting, it should also be a norm to summarize PR responses (helpful, dismissive, evasive or whatever) and link to a summary of the PR text, rather than treating it as valid body copy.
- dandellion 1y agoThey take people for idiots. This can work a few times, but even someone who isn't the brightest will eventually put two and two together when they get screwed again and again and again.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoPeople need to treat PR like they do AIs. "You utterly failed to answer the question, try again and actually answer the question I asked this time." I'd love to see corporate representatives actually pressed to answer. "Did you actually do X, yes or no, if you dodge the question I'll present you as dodging the question and let people assume the worst."
- refulgentis 1y agoChallenging or even characterizing the PR line is usually treated as an unjustified attack to justify inflated claims of bias.
- duped 1y ago
- chris_wot 1y agoI think a call to Australia’s privacy commissioner might be in order.
- globalnode 1y agoWhat are they gonna do? Hard to have a convo with your master when youre on your knees...
- yupyupyups 1y agoWell put.
- chris_wot 1y agoNot really.
- chris_wot 1y agoFine the living daylights out of them. They are quite willing and able to do so.
- LunaSea 1y agoI was afraid for the EU economy, but after this declaration I'm reassured that Microsoft will pay for my grand kids' education in 30 years.
- moooo99 1y agoI think the EU is flawed in more ways that just one. But every time I see „<AI feature> will be available starting now outside EU“ I am really grateful
- LogicFailsMe 1y agoI've never seen a better case for uploading endless AI slop photos.
- GeekyBear 1y agoYou can really tell that Microsoft has adopted advertising as a major line of business. The privacy violations they are racking up are very reminiscent of prior behavior we've seen from Facebook and Google.
- dreamcompiler 1y agoAnd not just advertising. If ICE asks Microsoft to identify accounts of people who have uploaded a photo of "Person X", do you think they're going to decline? They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant. I'd bet Microsoft is doing this more because of threats from USG than because of advertising revenue.
- zzgo 1y ago> They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant I'm old enough to remember when companies were tripping over themselves after 9/11 trying to give the government anything they could to help them keep an eye on Americans. They eventually learned to monetize this, and now we have the surveillance economy.
- einpoklum 1y agoICE don't have to ask for anything, the USG gets a copy of all data Microsoft collects from you, anyway. Remember: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-10-most-disturbing-snowden-revelations https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-10-most-disturbing-snowden-re...
- cube00 1y ago> They'd probably do it happily even without a warrant. ...and build them a nice portal to submit their requests and get the results back in real time.
- nxpnsv 1y agoI don't understand how america works, but surely Microsoft isn't paid for data requested by whatever agency?
- smileson2 1y agoMicrosoft in the past few years has totally lost it's mind, it's ruining nearly everything it touches and I can't understand why
- mixmastamyk 1y agoMoney and power. Who was the first BigTech co on the Prism slides? Who muscled out competitors in the 90s?
- Spooky23 1y agoThey never changed. For some reason Satya became CEO and nerds fawned over the “new Microsoft” for whatever reason. They are a hard nosed company focused with precision on dominance for themselves.
- uep 1y agoDo we even think that was real? I think social media has been astroturfed for a long time now. If enough people make those claims, it starts to feel true even without evidence to support it. Did they ever open source anything that really make you think "wow"? The best I could see was them "embracing" Linux, but embrace, extend, extinguish was always a core part of their strategy.
- charles_f 1y agoInsider here, in m365 though not onedrive. It did change, but not because of satya ; because of rules and legislation and bad press. Privacy and security are taken very seriously (at least by people who care to follow internal rules) not because "we're nice", but because - EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our toes, do things by the book, and be auditable - it's bad press when we get caught doing garbage like that. And bad press is bad for business In my org, doing anything with customer's data that isn't directly bringing them value is theoretically not possible. You can't deliver anything that isn't approved by privacy. Don't forget that this is a very big company. It's composed of people who actually care and want to do the right thing, people who don't really care and just want to ship and would rather not be impeded by compliance processes, and people who are actually trying to bypass these processes because they'd sell your soul for a couple bucks if they could. For the little people like me, the official stance is that we should care about privacy very much. Our respect for privacy was one of the main reasons I'm still there. There has been a good period of time where the actual sentiment was "we're the good guys", especially when comparing to google and Facebook. A solid portion of that was that our revenue was driven by subscriptions rather than ads. I guess the appeal to take customer's money and exploit their data is too big. The kind of shit that will get me to leave.
- exe34 1y agoMakes me want to download and install windows, and store a picture of my hairy brown nutsack with googly eyes on it.
- The_President 1y agoCue Nair and football season ads
- theturtle 1y ago[dead]
- correlator 1y agoDoes this mean that when you disable, all labels are deleted, and when you turn it back on it has to re-scan all of your photos? Could this be a cost-saving measure?
- d-sky 1y agoIn that case, they should make it the other way around — you can enable this only three times a year.
- ok_dad 1y agoThey should do it the other direction, then: if you turn it off more than three times you can’t turn it back on.
- margalabargala 1y agoBut that's less good for profit. Why would they give up money for morals?
- bayindirh 1y agoEsp. when you can just eat money to survive when you relocate to the Mars, no?
- alterom 1y ago>Does this mean that when you disable, all labels are deleted AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha. Nice one.
- xigoi 1y agoIt’s like expecting a lion to stop eating you if you ask it politely.
- dandellion 1y agoNo, it's a profit-seeking measure.
- ptrl600 1y agoPresumably you just need to turn it off once, right?
- anarticle 1y agoYear of the Linux desktop edges ever closer.
- anigbrowl 1y agoTruly bizarre. I'm so glad I detached from Windows a few years back, and now when I have to use it or another MS product (eg an Xbox) it's such an unpleasant experience, like notification hell with access control checks to read the notifications. The sad thing is that they've made it this way, as opposed to Windows being inherently deficient; it used to be a great blend of GUI convenience with ready access to advanced functionality for those who wanted it, whereas MacOS used to hide technical things from a user a bit too much and Linux desktop environments felt primitive. Nowadays MS seems to think of its users as if they were employees or livestock rather than customers.
- wkat4242 1y agoMicrosoft is such a scummy company. They always were but they've become even worse since they've gone all in on AI. I wonder if this is also a thing for their EU users. I can think of a few laws this violates.
- pessimizer 1y agoIsn't it cute when there's absolutely no rationale behind a new rule, and it's simply an incursion made in order to break down a boundary? Look, scanning with AI is available! Wow, scanning with AI is now free for everyone! What? Scanning with AI is now opt-out? Why would opting-out be made time-limited? WTF, what's so special about 3x a year? Is it because it's the magic number? Ah, the setting's gone again, I guess I can relax. I guess the market wanted this great feature, or else they wouldn't have gradually forced it on us. Anyway, you're a weird techie for noticing it. What do you have to hide?
- bigbuppo 1y agoThere is a big rationale behind it. If their AI investments don't pan out, Microsoft will cease to exist. They've been out of ideas since the late 90s. They know that the subscription gravy train has already peaked. There is no more growth unless they fabricate new problems for which they will then force you to pay for the solution to the problem they created for you. Oh, your children were kidnapped because Microsoft sold their recognition and location data to kidnappers? Well you should have paid for Microsoft's identity protection E7 plus add-on subscription that prevents them from selling the data you did not authorize them to collect to entities that they should know better than to deal with.
- nbngeorcjhe 1y agoI don't even get why they would need "ideas" or "growth" tbh. They have most popular desktop operating system, they have one of the most popular office suites, surely they make plenty of profit from those. If they just focused on making their existing products not shit they would remain a profitable company indefinitely. But instead they're enshittifying everything because they want more More MORE
- Ekaros 1y agoBecause there are too many people chasing of ever going up line on valuation chart. It is simply not acceptable anymore to have reasonable business that generates solid dividends and grows with opening markets and population. Blame the silicon valley, VC and like...
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoIt really seems as though Microsoft has total contempt for their retail/individual customers. They do a lot to inconvenience those users, and it often seems gratuitous and unnecessary. (As it does in this case.) ...I guess Microsoft believes that they're making up for it in AI and B2B/Cloud service sales? Or that customers are just so locked-in that there's genuinely no alternative? I don't believe that the latter is true, and it's hard to come back from a badly tarnished brand. Won't be long before the average consumer hates Microsoft as much as they hate HP (printers).
- bigbuppo 1y agoThis is once again strongly suggesting that Microsoft is thoroughly doomed if the money they've dumped into AI doesn't pan out. It seems to me that if your company is tied to Microsoft's cloud platform, you should probably consider moving away as quickly as you can. Paying the vmware tax and moving eveyrthing in house is probably a better move at this point.
- syntaxing 1y agoGrowing up, Microsoft dominance felt so strong. 3 decades later, there’s a really high chance my kids will never own or use a windows machine (unless their jobs gives them one).
- ghssds 1y agoDo you remember this: http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html ? Microsoft hate was something else in the '90s and 2000s. Yet people stayed with it as if they had no choice while OS/2, AmigaOS, NextStep, BeOS and all those UNIXes died.
- mistrial9 1y agoan employer requires their workers to use Windows; the target audience for Windows is management, their HR and attorneys, and then greater security services. MSFT sells investigative services.
- EasyMark 1y agoA lot of people didn't and still don't. Sometimes your job/business requires certain software that is only available on windows. I'm not giving up my job for an OS. for the past 15 years or so I could do everything on Mac and Linux, but that might not always be the case. I certainly wouldn't pass up a lucrative consulting position because it was windows only.
- chmod775 1y agoBack then people really didn't have much of a choice. Nowadays most things happen in browsers anyways, WINE/Proton have come a long way, and alternatives to almost anything windows-only have reached a critical quality threshold.
- chrsw 1y ago>unless their jobs gives them one Microsoft knows the vast majority of professionals are forced to use their products and services or else they can't put food on the table. That's why Microsoft can operate with near impunity.
- einpoklum 1y ago> I uploaded a photo on my phone to Microsoft's That's your problem right there. > Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning Their _UI_ says they let you opt out. I wouldn't bet on that actually being the case. At the very least - a copy of your photos goes to the US government, and they do whatever they want with it.
- gessha 1y agoThis made me look up if you can disable iOS photo scanning and you can’t. Hmm.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Slashdot: What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year? (And are those any three times — or does that mean three specific days, like Christmas, New Year's Day, etc.) > [Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]
- yencabulator 1y agoReminder: Microsoft owns Github and NPM.
- christophilus 1y agoFedora with vanilla Gnome is excellent for anyone looking for an alternative.
- more_corn 1y agoThat’s not opt out. Opt out is the ability to say no. If you’re not allowed to say no there’s no consent and you’re being forced.
- Aurornis 1y agoIf you opt out and then never turn it back on, you have opted out.
- yupyupyups 1y agoBecause Microsoft is known to respect user settings between (forced) Windows Updates and not turn stuff back on...
- Aurornis 1y agoThey could have avoided the negative press by changing the requirement to be that you can’t re-enable the feature after switching it off 3 times per year. It’s not hard to guess the problem: Steady state operation will only incur scanning costs for newly uploaded photos, but toggling the feature off and then on would trigger a rescan of every photo in the library. That’s a potentially very expensive operation. If you’ve ever studied user behavior you’ve discovered situations where users toggle things on and off in attempts to fix some issue. Normally this doesn’t matter much, but when a toggle could potentially cost large amounts of compute you have to be more careful. For the privacy sensitive user who only wants to opt out this shouldn’t matter. Turn the switch off, leave it off, and it’s not a problem. This is meant to address the users who try to turn it off and then back on every time they think it will fix something. It only takes one bad SEO spam advice article about “How to fix _____ problem with your photos” that suggests toggling the option to fix some problem to trigger a wave of people doing it for no reason.
- godelski 1y ago> It’s not hard to guess the problem: toggling the feature off and then on would trigger a rescan of every photo in the library. That's would be a wild way to implement this feature. I mean it's Microsoft so I wouldn't be surprised if it was done in the dumbest way possible but god damn this would be such a dumb way to implement this feature.
- urbandw311er 1y agoThis would be because of the legal requirement to purge (erase) all the previous scan data once a user opts out. So the only way to re-enable is to scan everything again — unless you have some clever way I’ve not thought of?
- fiddlerwoaroof 1y agoIn theory, you could store a private key on the device and cryptoshred the data on Microsoft’s servers when the setting is disabled (Microsoft deletes their copy of the key). Then, when the feature is re-enabled, upload the private key to Microsoft again.
- Nition 1y agoDo you think the PR person responding here feels, underneath it all, the inhumanity of their responses? The fact that they're merely wasting everyone's time with their prevaricated non-answers? Knowing what they need to say to keep their job but hurting internally at the stupidity of it all. Or do they end up so enmeshed with the corporate machine that that they start to really believe it all makes sense?
- staviette 1y agoI think - at least for the people who stick with a career in PR - that they enjoy playing the game of giving an answer that is sort of related to the question but doesn't actually give a single bit of useful information. That they enjoy seeing how far they can push it without the interviewer straight up accuse them of not answering the question. At least that's the only way I can imagine them keeping their sanity.
- bapak 1y agoIt's in their job description, they're most likely very proud of how their words can swindle the majority. They're greasy and they love it.
- citizenpaul 1y agoI think HN skews towards a somewhat naive but good natured crowd. Every time ethics or morality comes up on here there is no shortage of defenders that simply don't want to accept the fact. Yes there are bad people out there that are not only ok with the bad things they do but even some that actively enjoy it and pursue more of it.
- Nition 1y agoWell, I'll admit that I hadn't even really thought of the option where they know it's evil but they just enjoy it until these responses. I figured they'd either hate their job or have convinced themselves that they're actually doing good. To be fair I think a lot of outwardly-evil people have convinced themselves internally that they're good people.
- bob1029 1y agoMicrosoft gets a lot less difficult to reason about when we start to think of it as a statistical mean of human nature rather than the mind of one arbitrary evil bastard. They have 228k employees. The CEO has virtually zero direct influence on the end work product of any team. Any organization this large is going to have approximately the same level of dysfunction overall. But, there are almost always parts of these organizations where specific leaders have managed to carve out a fiefdom and provide some degree of actual value to the customer. In the case of Microsoft, examples of these would be things like .NET, C#, Visual Studio [Code], MSSQL, Xbox. Windows, Azure & AI are where most of the rot exists at Microsoft. Office is a wash - I am not a huge fan of what has happened to my Outlook install over the years, but Teams has dramatically stabilized since the covid days. Throwing away the rest of the apple because of a few blemishes is a really wasteful strategy.
- mkrishnan 1y agofuck microsoft
- The_President 1y agoMicro Soft Windows With a name like that who needs gravity.
- getnormality 1y ago> You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year. Who's making the t-shirts? Don't forget the Microsoft logo. They're proud of this! In my head it's sounding like that Christmas jingle. It's the most wonderful time of the year!
- CGamesPlay 1y agoThis doesn't feel like a problem at all. I only need to turn the setting off once, right? My immediate question to seeing that verbiage was, "how many times does the setting turn itself on in a year?"
- drnick1 1y agoWhy would anyone use this crap at this point? Buy a (possible used) mini PC or thin client, install Linux and Samba on it, and voila, your own private "cloud" completely free of corporate interference, spyware and recurring fees. This works best with a static IP for remote access via Wireguard but it can be made to work on a residential connection. With a little more effort you can deploy Nextcloud, Home Assistant and a few other great FOSS projects and completely free yourself from Big Tech. The hardest part will probably be email on a residential connection, but it can be done with the help of a relay service for outgoing mail.
- noisy_boy 1y agoBy each passing day since I switched from using Windows to Linux at home, with decreasing friction, I am increasingly happy that I took time to learn Linux and stuck with it. This not a come to Linux call because I know it is easier said than done for most of non technical folks. But it is a testimony that if you do, the challenges eventually will be worth it. Because at this point, Microsoft is just openly insulting their captive users.
- lstodd 1y agoYou know, in 90s in Russia in IT circles Windows was known as "маздай" which is a transliteration of "must die". Looks like nothing has changed.
- amiga-workbench 1y agoMicrosoft's understanding of consent is about on-par with that of a rapist.
- The_President 1y agoI say this about advertising and after recently using Win11 for the first time to remove malware, I was left with a gross feeling. My friend whose computer it was is not highly PC literate, but when I was talking about the AI shit built in to these platforms, you could see the disgust building.
- resheku 1y agoEU please whack them and whack them good
- yupyupyups 1y agoYou should ask the EU what happed with the Digital Markets Act, and if it's possible to install arbitrary software on an iPhone today. If the answer is "no, you can't", then that should give you a hint of how effective the EU really is when it comes to these issues.
- dsign 1y agoMicrosoft gets most of its money from big corporate customers. Some of those customers are obligated by law to not leak sensitive personal data to servers in USA soil, because those customers have the missfortune of being in countries with strong privacy laws, functioning civil societies and sometimes even left-winged governments. I know for a fact that the product in question, "OneDrive", it's sometimes mandated in those companies as a backup solution for the company's computers. All it takes is a whistle-blowing incident or a chat with a journalist for this to become a major blow-up for Microsoft, with companies forced by tribunals to back off from contracts with Microsoft.
- mbf1 1y agoI wonder if you can write a program to make pictures with face tattoos be the normal for Microsoft AI to train on, like see if enough people did this, if Microsoft's facial recognition started generating lots of face tats...
- mk89 1y agoSo the message is: if you can, don't use OneDrive. If you can't (work, etc.) try to avoid uploading sensitive documents in onedrive. I always wondered who uses OneDrive for cloud storage. Hell, I think even Google Drive is better. Microsoft has really pivoted to AI for all things. I wonder how many customers they will get vs how many they will lose due to this very invasive way of doing things.
- buyucu 1y agoThis is your daily reminder not to use Microsoft.
- teekert 1y ago"It's not your data citizen, you should be happy we made this OS for you. You are not smart enough to do it your self, we know what is best." I can never help myself from hearing this inside, and am just incredibly thankful that we have Linux and FOSS in general. That really gives me hope for humanity at this point. I type this in FireFox, on NixOS, with all my pics open in another tab, in Immich. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- account42 1y agoMozilla doesn't think it's your data either.
- Lio 1y agoThis sounds like the next level of the nauseating “maybe later”. i.e. You’ll do what we tell you eventually.
- ajrouvoet 1y agoMeta just lost a court case against bits of freedom in the Netherlands, because their instagram setting to turn off the attention grabbing feed would reset every month or so. The court ruled that this infringed on the user’s freedom. Source: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/court-tells-meta-to-give-dutch-users-algorithm-free-feed-option/#:~:text=Meta%20must%20allow%20users%20in,Digital%20Services%20Act%20(DSA). https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/court-tells-meta-to-give-du...
- immibis 1y ago503 service unavailable - did Slashdot get HNed? Ironic. (Probably not - it's probably unrelated)
- lawcomingfyms 1y agoWhat happens to the faces in photos that do not belong to the photo owner? Do they get scanned as well without the person's permission?
- taylorius 1y agoIt's enough to make a man consider Linux...
- account42 1y agoA man perhaps, but not the average frog. The frog will continue to insist that it will freeze if it dares to step out of the familiar warm pot.
- api 1y agoWhy does anyone still run Windows? Games I guess. Both Mac and Linux desktop/laptop machines are better and less loaded with shit. If you don’t need or want a full featured PC you have Android and iOS which are also better. Android you have to be careful of but if you pick well it can be customizable and less loaded with shit. Steam is available for both Linux and macOS. Are there just not as many game titles? I just saw Cyberpunk show up in the Apple Store for Mac so there seems to be an effort to port more games off Windows. I have a Windows VM but use it less and less. Only need now is to test and build some software for Windows. Also: I realized what I do kind of like about Apple and how best to describe their ecosystem. It’s the devil you know. They are fairly consistent in their policies and they are better on privacy than others. Some of their policies suck, but they suck in known consistent ways. If I left Apple, Linux (probably on Framework) is the only alternative.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago> Why does anyone still run Windows? > Games I guess. Music, and video.
- d3Xt3r 1y ago> Steam is available for both Linux and macOS. Are there just not as many game titles? A vast majority of the games work fine under Linux now, in fact most release these days woke even on day one of release. The only games that don't really work are ones which use invasive kernel-level anti-cheat systems.
- account42 1y ago> Why does anyone still run Windows? Learned helplessness.
- drumhead 1y agoWe created this oligopoly because they were convenient, free, powerful, and now its time for us to pay the price. Or find services that may not be as easy to use, may cost something and may not have all the features you want, but which wont make unreasonable demands for your data. In light of the way the US government is carrying on, I'd rather not give Microsoft any of my images.
- account42 1y ago> In light of the way the US government is carrying on, I'd rather not give Microsoft any of my images. What is this supposed to mean? That you'd be happier with the dystopia if they were going after people you like less?
- superkuh 1y agoI'm kind of surprised that it is Microsoft leading the field in this. It seems like something that'd be much more at home on an Apple or Google smartphone. But I suppose smartphones don't have the hardware or network power or resources to pull this off without noticibly degrading the smartphone performance.
- r0b05 1y agoDisabling offline accounts is one thing but scanning and labeling your files to profile users is a whole other can of worms. This trajectory leads to zero privacy for the user and I feel like switching to Linux/Mac will be the only option sadly.
- ziofill 1y agoSlashdot: why opt-out rather than opt-in? Microsoft: it's just a shit as Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
- unixhero 1y agoTo believe I was paying for this yearly Unbelievable
- sombragris 1y agoObviously the whole point is to make AI overreach avoidance as painful as possible. Of course, that's also the reason why Lens was deprecated despite being a good, useful app, forcing one to deal with the bload of Copilot 365.
- Selecktor1 1y ago[dead]