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 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” for almost two years…
There should be some sort of class action lawsuit.
What if some friends who took photos of me drop them in their cloud which happens to be OneDrive. Then Microsoft recognize me, with AI face-scanning. And can track some information that way.
I’m not that important lol, but eventually, this will become the norm for everyone.
I hope this causes people to be more skeptical of face recognition tools. But it probably won’t. Also specifying that the setting can only be turned off 3 times a year is insane to me.
I don’t think anyone should really trust MSFT and it’s any totally local feature either. Unless your device is offline to the point of not even having a WiFi chip in it, I ain’t trusting the so called operating system.
The bastardization of what a computer should be has gone on long enough by them.
