Microsoft OneDrive lets you disable AI face recognition three times in a year!
if the off switch works yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm9KnhCB0oc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251012-microsoft-lets-you-disable-ai-face-recognition-three-times-a-year - podcast
time: 4 min 03 sec
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/12/microsoft-onedrive-lets-you-disable-ai-face-recognition-three-times-in-a-year/Open linkView original on awful.systems235
Comments20
You can't make this shit up XD
If you had told me ten years ago that Microsoft would one day become one of our best allies in the attempt to persuade people to use open source for their own damn good, I would probably have sarcastically replied something like "yeah and next you'll be telling me somehow Oracle will sour people on centralized social media too."
...Huh. What a weird timeline.
godsdamn fucking CERN weasels jumping us on the wrong timeline
Okay. So how often does it turn itself back on if ever?
Given Microsoft's vision of user consent, after every update.
We don't know yet. My guess is something around 90 days so you're not able to fend off the beast forever.
Whenever it is convenient for Microsoft, and when you least expect it.
I guess install it and see!
I'm good, thanks
For a second I thought this was The Onion. This is so dark and invasive but I can't stop myself from laughing. It's like they don't even care to pretend anymore.
Fuck everything about that.
Somebody got fed up they were only evaluated on "%of people who adopted AI". This feels very malicious compliance to me.
Don’t trust Microsoft with your data. In general, big tech companies are not trustworthy. Store your own data as much as possible.
I am told that Apple, DropBox, etc. have done this for years, often in the name of "fighting CSAM" or "helping you organize your photos". https://support.apple.com/en-us/108795 Agree that its a very good reason not to touch corporate cloud services and to not let people take digital photos of your face even if they promise not to share them! I do not trust any company with physical assets in the USA not to be penetrated by three-letter-organizations and data brokers.
Apple does not look at your data. Several years ago they announced plans to scan for “harmful content” and quickly abandoned it when watchdogs called them out on the plan being a horrendous privacy violation.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/31/apple-provides-detailed-reasoning-behind-abandoning-iphone-csam-detection
didn't they recent-ish have a "oops, you weren't supposed to see that we're making backups of your deleted photos, sry not sry" incident?
Dont know about that incident, but that is different than scanning for csam which is different than scanning for faces which is different from feeding your images into an genAI training set.
You could think that they are doing all this anyway (which I think the AI only companies do btw, vut doubt the bigger ones do, esp Apple).
There was a bug that allowed for photos marked for deletion to not be deleted.
It does look like Apple canned the idea of scanning photos for CSAM back in 2022 though. I can't find a record of them scanning the "deleted" photos, just record of reports of "deleted" photos resurfacing on wiped/factory reset devices that had been sold.
It does look like the facial recognition in the support.apple.com link is opt-in!
What if you don't have a camera?