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.
“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.
And even if you find it, it will have an idiotic and obscure name, like “advanced history experience” or something absolutely nondescript
The exact wording, which, again, is in the article you didn’t bother to read before posting, is “Quickly find things you’ve seen with Recall. Recall helps you find things you’ve seen on your PC when you allow Windows to save snapshots of your screen every few seconds”.
Seriously, I don’t even like the feature. I will absolutely turn it off, just like I did Timeline, and I expect it’ll be gone in the next version, just like Timeline was.
But I did look at the stupid article before posting. So there’s that.
So, are we done berating everybody passive-aggressively with just a sprinkle of condescension? Because maybe, just maybe, I was making a remark about the general practice of Microsoft to hide stuff behind nondescript bullshit names (especially in non-English versions where the English bullshit name gets translated literally most of the time, which yields even more nondescript results).
Maybe, just maybe, you chose the wrong comments to act up on “PeOpLe NoT rEaDiNg ThE aRtIcLe” when all that was posted about was inconsequential stuff about the precise clicks needed to turn a feature off that’s not even in the respective menus yet. So this is not someone talking bullshit because they misunderstood the headline about a murder case or something.
All that was said was about practices Microsoft has abused into oblivion: Hiding stuff behind obscure menus and hiding stuff behind obscure names. The comments made were a persiflage of exactly that.
Maybe, just maybe, the precise placement and wording in a menu that doesn’t even exist yet is a topic inconsequential enough that people will not read the tenth article about the general subject (Copilot becoming “opt-in”) to make sure they wouldn’t miss this super irrelevant point to the story. A point which you guessed from screenshots that haven’t reached production yet (even if they are likely to go into production as shown, it can still change), so your condescending attitude is based on wobbly grounds.
There are tons of articles where people post absolutely wrong and quite absurd stuff because they didn’t read the article. Some of them even matter (politics, world events). So let’s criticize people when they don’t read through actually important articles before posting, and agree that it’s okay to not read the exact article posted on unimportant sidenote stuff if one knows about the thing in general. Because if I’d be only allowed to comment on the article posted itself, I wouldn’t need Lemmy, I could just comment on the site that posted the article in the first place.
Besides: You did notice that you commented on two different people, yes? Because you sure sounded like you didn’t read the usernames before commenting and thought you always replied to the same guy.
Even without all the invasion of privacy implications, I’m skeptical it would even work. Source: 20 years of “Windows is checking for a solution to the problem” that has never worked even once.
I’ve actually had those troubleshooters work for me several times in recent years. Mostly fixing networking issues.
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 screenshot doesn’t show preceding flow to reach it, but I did miss the “requires windows hello to enable” bit, which does suggest that wherever it is, it would have to be opt-in.
It doesn’t because that’s one of the four or five screens during the initial Windows setup where you opt in and out of all the other spyware features. They all look the same and are prompted in sequence. Unless they’re doing something very weird you absolutely have to make a choice on each of them and they are unskippable otherwise.
I mean, you don’t have to know, if you don’t know Windows you don’t have to recognize them. But if you do it’s pretty obivous, so you… you know, could have asked or looked it up.
Or gone through the link, because come on, you didn’t. You were obviously just reacting to the headline.
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.
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
This is so fantastical that there’s no point in even having the hypothetical discussion about it.
You’re right, it’s fantastical, but it’s still worth talking about.
It’s worth talking about as it solidifies the argument more than just assuming your opponent is acting poorly. The argument of “Even if Microsoft is a saint, it’s still a bad idea. But we know Microsoft also has a history of data collection, spying, anti-patterns etc.” is a much stronger argument than the latter half on its own
You’re right, it’s fantastical, but it’s still worth talking about.
Is it though?
It’s a feature which is very clearly evil and of very little benefit to the user. Only a shit business like Microsoft would even attempt it, lie about it being secure, then make it “optional” (and we all know what that means) and it will still be an insecure mess when it’s done, sucking down resources from a machine I purchased for no benefit to myself.
The “feature” by it’s current definition can only be conceived of by a piece of shit organisation like Microsoft.
No need to separate the art from the artist in this case, as they are perfectly aligned.
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 forgot Step 0: make an announcement so overtly egregious that when you walk it back, the compromise sounds reasonable
Still in the os…
