I uploaded a photo on my phone to Microsoft's "OneDrive" file-hosting app — and there was a surprise waiting under Privacy and Permissions. "OneDrive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos..."

And...

"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."

If I moved the slidebar for that setting to the left (for "No"), it moved back to the right, and said "Something went wrong while updating this setting." (Apparently it's not one of those three times of the year.)

The feature is already rolling out to a limited number of users in a preview, a Microsoft publicist confirmed to Slashdot. (For the record, I don't remember signing up for this face-recognizing "preview".) But there's a link at the bottom of the screen for a "Microsoft Privacy Statement" that leads to [1]a Microsoft support page , which says instead that "This feature is coming soon and is yet to be released." And in the next sentence it's been saying "Stay tuned for more updates" [2]for almost two years ...

A Microsoft publicist [3]agreed to answer Slashdot's questions ...



[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/group-photos-by-people-21065f48-c746-48ad-a98a-cbe4631631bc

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231109163626/https://support.microsoft.com/

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