64 .... I mean three times ...

640K changes ought to be enough for anyone.

After you signed the contract. Of course.

It doesn't matter if you change the setting to sod off or do me. Given M$'s past behaviour, a "bug" will override your choice and turn the feature on whether you like it or not. Maybe M$ can staple it to my prostate right next to CoPilot

Trust us Trust us. Trust us.

Done. Now that we have earned your trust, let us screw you over even more royally.

All of these terms and conditions are written by lawyers and riddled with loopholes in the exact same way that threat actors worm in and leave APTs in software.

Realistically, there's no way to parse out who is really doing what with your data, assuming they don't flagrantly violate their terms and conditions as big tech is often wont to do. After all, even if they get caught, what are you going to do about it?

How do you even compute damages for loss of privacy?

How do you even determine the scope of what is shared / lent / given / copied / grouped / sold / leased / teasingly flashed or whatever between companies?

You either trust a company or you don't, based on what they've been caught doing in the past.

Personally, I don't trust Microsoft further than I can throw their oddly-bloated founder who somehow bears an uncanny resemblance to the pregnant man emoji.

Nobody should trust Alphabet or Meta, at all, ever.

Nothing to worry about !!!

How else would MS get to test out their 'AI' unless you allow them total access to your 'Data' for your their benefit !!!

Of course, the data is safe and would NEVER be misused !!!

Every day in Every way I feel Safer & Safer knowing that the Tech Behemoths & 'AI' are looking after my Best Interests !!!

:)

Oh course they're looking after your best interests. How else can they take them if they can't find them?

but if it is my face how do I opt out ? I do not use any Microsoft software or service.

This should be opt in by the individuals in the pictures.

Well, you do not have standing.

At least, that will be the reason they give you. Unless, you prove that your photograph was misappropriated and misused.

Then they say, go sue the person(s) who misappropriated your photograph.

All in all, Microsoft will say it is a Not-A-Microsoft-Problem situation and you should bother someone else.

There is nothing you can do. Microshaft supplies governments so they are untouchable.

Does that mean if you disable it, then at some point it will reactivate

To me, you deactivate and it should not activate until you decide

I particularly enjoy the fact that at 3 changes a year, mashing that setting will lock it in the 'on' state. Sneaky.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/11/0238213/microsofts-onedrive-begins-testing-face-recognizing-ai-for-photos-for-some-preview-users#microsoft_spokesperson

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.]

... Which if MS management hadn't redacted it, probably would have said:

" Yes, we hear you've called this sort of thing a 'Dark Pattern'. How cute. Yes, we just don't want you turning it off, really. The more of you who do, the less dosh we get from [1]Mr. Ellison et al. "

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/larry_ellison_wants_all_data/

...will be passed onto your local authoritative police force.

ICE have already wet themselves at the thought of this data.

Why 3 times a year? Because they are paid the ingress cost and the compute costs and they don’t want people to flick the setting on/off/on/off. They already knew this would create resource issues in Azure so they set the retention to 30days anyway. I guess they don’t do a good job of remembering which pictures are already processed and so are worried about thrashing the upload/compute each time it’s toggled on/off/on. I bet the database backend ‘delete user’s data’ request is heavy and slow so they want to protect the backend. It’s a crap UX and suggests there’s a crap architecture/implementation behind it.

Apple have had this feature on iOS for years - I suspect the difference is that the ‘people’ metadata is stored on the user-device on the Apple implementation and not some central creepy database (Microsoft implementation).

You seriously believe that after so many apple-cloud scandals? The are not better. Just different.

Well, they at least " [1]think different ". Especially when it comes to knowing the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

Ob-observing the hypocrites

As they would mingle with the good data we fed

And when its gone

Everything is gonna be alright

Then shalt thee

s/ee/ou/

Enough said.

Yes | Ask again later | No

Yes | Ask again later

Yes | Ask again later (maximum 3 times)

And soon it'll be:

Yes

From the company that infamously redefined the [X] Close Window button to mean "Yes, please go ahead and perform the Windows 10 upgrade", what else would we expect?

I use Linux, so I'm not concerned about my own photos, but I will definitely think twice before letting anyone else take photos of me. I guess I have to start treating family like paparazzi.

I have it because I have MS accounts. But I don't put any photos anywhere near it.

People stop this nonsense and switchover to Mega, which is a file storage similar to OneDrive but end-to-end encrypted. No A.I. bullshit and no one scrutinizing your files or feeding them to A.I.

https://www.mega.io

Or [1]Cryptomator (open source) to encrypt the file client side before uploading to any cloud service.

[1] https://github.com/cryptomator

Why would anyone that can afford ~60£/month for a interest free Mac continue to use anything M$.

I would bet if you turn it off and then back on again it deletes and then re-creates the training data at great expense of electricty usage. Imagine if a few million (insert onedrive user numbers joke here) people constantly turned it off and on again... MS datacenteres would be glowing.

On one story today:

'Microsoft is clear that it won't use facial scans or biometric data in the training of its AI models'

Another:

'Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students via 365 Education, says data watchdog'

Your very own digital Panopticon. The people building this don't seem to realize it will eventually be turned on them. Not that it matters as the IRS and the spooks already have access to your confidential records.

[1]The Digital Panopticon: Surveillance Technologies, Big Data, and the Crisis of Democratic Societies

[1] https://understandingai.iea.usp.br/nota-critica/the-digital-panopticon-surveillance-technologies-big-data-and-the-crisis-of-democratic-societies/

Just make sure you identify every face in every photo you let get near Onefart as being Satya Nadella.

Maybe even set up a few dummy accounts too.

Besties

Satya Nadella

There are, I have no doubt, people who will gratefully use, even welcome, the core feature of this.

But what MS ( and other big tech companies ) do is add in a whole lot of other stuff round itfor no justifiable reason- like making it difficult to not use.

Microsoft’s egregious spreading of this stuff is beyond belief - but the likes of Meta aren't far behind.

AI "features" are just the most recent and worst examples of this.

There's an argument for making AI stuff available to users. But the tech companies are trying to make it unavoidable. So yes, have face recognition in OneNote or that silly AI symbol in Whatsapp. But that doesn't mean it has to be forced on to users.

It would be really helpful for El Reg to always embed a How To Turn It Off, right there in the article.

Same for Recall, for those of us who were unfortunate enough to either be forced to run a work machine with Win11, with an IT dept that one doesn't trust to even know one of these features exists (I wish I was kidding, oh, how I wish). But also for the inevitable plethora of relatives who found themselves in the grip of Microsoft's enforced "opt-out-if-you-can" "enhancements".

I say putting it here, because we all know that web searching has become useless and GPTs are often hopelessly out of date.