Is AI the future, or just an ecologically ruinous, dangerously huge financial bubble? That’s hard to say, but it’s certainly a part of Microsoft’s future; on top of pushing Copilot as a non-negotiable part of the Microsoft 365 suite and reportedly mandating its employees put AI to work, the tech giant is reportedly rolling out a new biometric collection setting that can only be turned off three times a year.
A Slashdot story yesterday relayed an editor’s experience when he noticed that, after uploading a photo from his phone’s local storage to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage, the privacy and permissions page noted an opt-out “people section” feature wherein “OneDrive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos to help you find photos of friends and family.” When he went to turn it off, a disclaimer stated: “You can only turn off this setting three times a year.”
It doesn’t sound great, but users are speculating about what might motivate the restriction. Commenter on the Slashdot article AmiMoJo replied, “There might be a more benign reason for it. In GDPR countries, if you turn it off they will probably need to delete all the biometric data … if people toggle it too often, it’s going to consume a large amount of CPU time.” Regardless, the choice to make it opt-out rather than opt-in is sure to raise eyebrows among privacy advocates.
