They use dark patterns and cryptic dialog boxes to get old people to opt in.
Are you certain you don’t want to enhance your Microsoft experience?
^YES, I CRAVE A LIMITED ESPERIENCE^
NO, GIVE ME THE BEST THING
They’re just going to do a classical boil-the-frog operation:
- Step 1: Make it opt-in and present it as the new cool thing.
- Step 2: Make it opt-out, and if the users opts out, show a scary warning about how the cool thing won’t work anymore.
- Step 3: Silently opt-in, and hide the opt-out option deeply in a settings menu.
- Step 4: Silently opt-in, remove opt-out, but it still works with a registry hack. Microsoft apologists will still thinks it’s cool because “just use this simple registry hack bro”.
- Step 5: Remove opt-out alltogether, and silently opt-in everyone who had previously opted out.
- Step 6: Enjoy their boiled frog!
“You can still install it with a local account!”
Just disconnect your network cable, press this magic key combination and type this undocumented command: “MSBLAOIGKSDF /ACZSF”
You forgot Step 0: make an announcement so overtly egregious that when you walk it back, the compromise sounds reasonable
“The ability to disable the…feature during the setup process…” does not mean opt in, that means opt out.
Knowing windows setup, you need to click customize during the setup process and then go through several setup pages before you’re presented this option (or have to dig into additional/advanced settings to find it).
Most people won’t do this, won’t know how to do this, or will receive the pc with the initial setup complete and won’t know if this is on or off.
This is the screen the user is presented during setup.
not to mention they are known to re enable telemetry on systems after updates.
i doubt this will be any different.
And even if you find it, it will have an idiotic and obscure name, like “advanced history experience” or something absolutely nondescript
Also when you try to disable it they will use all sorts of dark pattern pop ups to dissuade you from disabling it.
There is a screenshot of the opt-in screen in the article. There is no default, just two buttons to say yes or no.
I swear, outrage should only be allowed based on the amount of work one is willing to put in before expressing it. If you don’t do the reading, you don’t get to be publicly angry. It’d save us all so much trouble.
For the record, the feature was always optional, as per the original announcement. Presumably the change is it is now part of the setup flow where it was going to be a settings toggle instead.
Which is, incidentally, how this used to work the first time Windows had this feature, back when it was called “Timeline” in Windows 10.
The problem with MS is how they change these things in the future. It may be a clear choice now, but they will find a way to make it easier to “accidentally” opt in, or they’ll simply change it to an opt-out. They’ve been doing this sort of bullshit for quite some time now.
They really haven’t. Their onboarding flow has included this exact type of forced option for advertising data, location data and bug reports for what now? A decade, give or take? They have a very specific design language for these.
Plus, and I keep reminding people of this and they keep forgetting, they already made this feature once. It was on Windows 10, it was called Timeline, everybody turned it off and they never did much to change that, instead just adding a less intrusive offline version of it and ultimately removing it by the launch of 11 until… well, now.
What I don’t understand is why you guys are so set on this specific list of grievances. You don’t need to dismiss the improvements they are making. They are improvements and they are a good thing.
If you are set on rooting for or against OSs (and why would you, stop it, that’s weird) you can instead just point out that… well, the feature itself is still garbage. Even with a default opt out, even assuming it’s fully secure. It just covers no valid use case, unless you’re starring in Memento II. It remains a security vulnerability because social engineering and shared computers are a thing. It is exactly as dumb and useless as Timeline was, and there’s a reason nobody remembers that happened. The lack of AI search really, really isn’t why that failed.
You don’t need to come across as a paranoid conspiracy theorist making up slippery slopes to keep criticising this about the things they are actually fixing. There are plenty of valid issues with it at a fundamental design level they are not changing. Being so wildly speculative about the eeeeevil corporate MS lying to us just makes the criticisms sound less valid when the actual thing they are doing is still pretty useless at best, and most likely really bad.
Ok, let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that everything is on the up-and-up, and Microsoft will behave in a completely equitable and user-friendly way with regard to this feature going forward. Where does that leave us?
There is a spyware feature built into Windows 11. It is off by default, but a malware that wants to capture this kind of information doesn’t have to install anything, and it doesn’t have to run any background processes that might get caught by a system monitor or blocked by application whitelisting. All it has to do is turn this built-in feature on, and then exfiltrate the data later.
Setting this off by default doesn’t remove the security issue.
No one is going to opt-in to having screenshots taken of their activities on the OS. If no one opts-in then it will hinder Microsoft’s original plan of collection such data for copilot. Along comes the new marketing language to soften the approach and they still collect data.
They will just enable it by default later when the heat passes. They always do. You no longer own Windows.
Never did. It’s just more and more obvious with each new “feature” that it’s built for monetization, not for user functionality.
In the '90s and early 2000s, Microsoft’s business model was the classic one of selling products to customers. Today, it’s all about the cloud, advertising, and AI, where the product is the user.
