For anyone thinking these situations are far fetched and privacy really isn't that important, there was a parent who sent photos of their child to their doctor and it was flagged as illegal by google. His account was closed and he lost access to all his files. He appealed the decision to google, which was denied. The police also started investigating and he was finally cleared after 10 months. Imagine 10 months of accusations of being a pedo, all because Google's bots

This was actually the final straw in switching to Linux. Windows kept giving me annoying pop-ups telling me my one drive space is full. I just realized, wait, so aka you just downloaded my files without my permission, and you're definitely analyzing it too.

This is data theft!! If any hacker did this same exact thing, turning on a Trojan horse that downloads a bunch of companies' private data, they would go to _prison_ . This HAS to be illegal! Someone, or many someones, _must_ go to prison for this. This is pure, unadulterated evil!!

Here's an idea: any company that wants to f' around with user privacy like that to be required by law to be 100% transparent: any meetings, emails and cals should be recorded and publicly available in plain, unencrypted form. If I have nothing to hide, better they do too.

When your in a constant battle with your operating system and operating system provider to both make that operating system functional and to not be spied on, you know once you've reached that point it is time to switch.

i recently bought a new computer for my parents, and since i know it's hard for them to learn new stuff, i made sure it was windows 10. it took me about 15 actual minutes of saying No to all their things, and the amount of "are you sure" and "you may be at risk" warnings was disturbing. it really felt like fearmongering

One thing about using vintage computers, the older operating systems can’t do the cloud sync thing.

MS wiping the files from your own drive truly was the bridge too far.

This company has clearly become an enemy of its customers. Another major problem is they no longer activate fully paid for retail versions of Office 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010. Which is illegal. No where on the box did it say 'to be used until year xxxx, or until MS decides you cant activate it'. Spying with logging your keystrokes and screen caps. Claiming to be a so-called green company, and yet requiring people to throw away perfectly good decent computers because cr*pware win11 wont install to it. Time for some class action suits against this monopoly. Time to see new ethical options.

I am putting Mint on my system tonight. This is unacceptable, a breach of trust and imo illegal. I didn't consent to this and they have no right to come onto MY machine (I own the operating system, the machine and the data that is on it, not them) and see what I am doing. I'm pretty sure I uninstalled OneDrive off of this machine and have it shut off regardless, but I am not taking the risk of them doing it secretly/covertly.

One drive has often been installed automatically when updating Win 10/11, even if I had it uninstalled.

Just because that little Green button the screen turns Red when you click it, and you feel it is OFF, ok if you say so. Changing colors doesn't mean it's OFF if that don't want it to be. We don't know what is going on in their software. They do what they want.

I discovered that this happened to me, but it's worse than that. Your "shared" folders are stored *ONLY* in OneDrive! Not locally! I was *BOILING!* And I've been getting my feet wet with Linux on virtual machines.

100% of the time, every single customer at my repair shop tells me they either don't know what onedrive is or they said they didn't want it enabled. 100%, never had a single customer who wanted it.

Years ago, we used to say UNIX for reliability, Mac for creativity and Windows for solitaire. We've basically gone back to that, now. The only reason I reboot my laptop into Windows is my Steam library. I wouldn't waste my time trying to do anything 'real' on a Windows box now.

I noticed Windows was downloading files in the My Pictures, My Documents ect folders a while back and realized on that install I had not disabled and or tried to uninstall OneDrive. So now I make sure to create essentially a new Home folder where I make sure to save any files to instead of the default locations which are inside the OneDrive folder. Sneaky underhanded tactics like that are constantly being slid under the door of users. It makes it a pain just to use a computer when you can't trust the operating system after each update.

Dystopia right in your face.

Just fill your Onedrive w/ memes about how Bill Gates visited Epstein Island dozens of times and watch them rollback onedrive. 😄😄

Window constantly wants to "finish setting up your pc" and only tries to take over the default browser with Edge + enable one drive.. oh, and sell some MS Office. It's *very* annoying.

Microsoft: "Oh, was that wrong? Should we not have done that?" This is just one in a LONG list of reasons why I finally switched to Linux. For the last ten years, my only relationship with Microsoft has been, "how much more crap am I willing to put up with from Microsoft before I ditch Windows completely?" I switched to Linux Mint over a month ago and I don't regret it one bit. Every time I've had to "go under the hood" with Windows (edit a Registry setting, change a config file, edit the Startup settings), it's been to prevent Microsoft from doing something sh*tty to me. I'm actually enjoying the learning curve with Linux and discovering new things about an operating system that's not constantly trying to screw me over.

What I have noticed is, if you create a local account for Win 11 via scripted setup (Basically an automated Win 11 install), it will STILL Bitlocker encrypt the drive, but hold onto the encryption ON THE MACHINE until you sign into a Microsoft account. Which means, you may think you have dodged a bullet with your local account set up, but you just primed the gun for a borked update to lose all your data with no encryption key to recover it... If it is the Home version, you are SOL as the management tool for BitLocker that is linked to when you go to tweak this, is Win 11 Pro ONLY, so Microsoft wants to sell you a pro license to fix it.

Imagine a lawyer that has his documents in the document folder. That go up to OneDrive that are to a very high-end case and then he loses the case because the defense had a way of beating because they knew the entire plan of how he was going to show them up so he was they were able to change things all because. It got into the one drive

And oh by the way, if you use something like Cryptomator on OneDrive, it might well get flagged as ransomware. So not only are you practically forced to use OneDrive, they want your data in plain-text. It's almost as though MSFT is acting on the direction of the state (US or otherwise) to conduct mass state surveillance.

When the hell is someone IN POWER, gonna step up/in and say, THIS ISN'T RIGHT? Grrrr

I've been making the switch to Linux gradually over the years and so glad that I've almost completely moved across. One of the main issues holding me back previously was tax returns, where the documents were PDFs and trying to open them with a reader other than Adobe Reader would fail. After some digging and research, I found Firefox's PDF reader is able to open my tax returns without any issues. So hopefully in the next month or so, I'll be completely Microsoft-free 🥳

Glad i am already switched to linux :D

"Oh, oops! Did we accidentally backup your Windows Recall data? Oopsie-daisy!" -Future M$, probably

I would highly recommend people set up a virtual machine and try Linux. That's what I did because not every program can be installed through the GUI; you will have to use the terminal. A VM allows you to get used to terminal commands, and many KZfaq videos have tutorials on how to use it, what commands you should definitely know, etc. Once you get familiar with the terminal, it becomes much easier to switch because you know exactly what to expect.

Microsoft can also scrap the data or train AI on it. And this is what everyone forgets. These servers get backed up. When you tell Microsoft to st stop steeling your data it doesn't erase the backups. And that data could still be around for years in the backups.

A few years ago they were doing this exact same thing. With nearly each windows update they would automatically install one drive (i had uninstalled it before this), automatically sign you into it (i had a local account and was only signed into MS Office), and upload as many files as they could starting with pictures while removing the local copies. I uninstalled one drive several times with this and kept an eye on it during each update, even logging out of ALL software that used a microsoft account and it would still sign me back in. With each day that passes I am 2 days closer to Linux.

Well, I did try Linux Mint 18 back in 2016 (I had used Windows at home from W95 to W7) . I'm still using Mint (21.3) right now, and I have no intention to change to anything else (with the exception of Mint 22). It just works. And for a former Windows-user it's pretty easy to learn. Not 1:1 copy of Windows UI, but not absurdly different either.

The implications of this are rather horrible. If you have some data you really do not want to send online (like private keys) and something like an update suddenly even once turns the file syncing up the data online you are basically screwed: once the data has been uploaded it's there and all you can do is damage control at that point. Even if you remove or overwrite the data from the remote disk do you really think the original data is actually gone and not only moved away from the eyes of the end user? Do you really think you can inspect all the updates and be paranoid about these settings all the time without ever letting your guard down? Microsoft can try this as many times they want and you'll need to only slip up once. The odds are really not on the side of the end user.

So many of these tech companies have zero respect for consumers at all. And people think this is the way to make bucks investing. Completely insane.

If you use a computer in any sort of professional capacity you likely have files on your computer that you don't have a license to share, Microsoft is pirating these files. It's irresponsible to use Windows at this point. You can go uncheck the folders in Onedrive, but they might just go ahead and check them again without your permission. Adobe took so much flak for something I personally find ever so slightly less egregious than this. MS also use this automatic Onedrive to scam senior citizens, because if the free storage fills up, they notify them they might "lose" their files if they don't pay for extra storage. Some seniors don't know the difference between their Onedrive and their harddrive and end up paying for storage, and literally thinking Microsoft held their files for ransom.

Regarding your point about IP address warrants being defective, ISPs do not permanently assign IP addresses to specific service addresses. An IP address could have been reassigned to one person's home AFTER another person used it violate laws.

If files are searchable on their web app then they're not stored encrypted. And if you read the T&C of their web app, you'll see that they can consider opinions in your files to be immoral, and delete your account on that basis. So if you have a file containing an opinion they consider to be motivated by animosity, but you don't want it uploaded, and you don't cause it to be uploaded, you can still lose the account which you need to access your own hardware.

This is just one of the things I hate about modern Windows. Windows Hello is another one. If you have purposely disabled your WiFi or LAN adaptor in Device Manager because you purposely wanted to be disconnected from the internet, for example, Windows Hello will turn it back on when the computer is re-started or cold booted. So scrub that as well. Then there is Bit Locker...the list goes on. Yes, it is of course still possible to navigate around all of these things but for how long.

There is only one thing I dislike about Windows - I /have to/ use it at my workplace. I purchased my new laptop just before last Christmas- cannot set it up without Internet you say? Well, having a usb stick flashed with Fedora definitively fixed that issue for me :)

I used W7 long after EOL because I just KNEW this day was coming. Well, now I write this comment from Arch. Down with the evil empire.

Wow. If you are into ripping your DVDs or BDs and putting them on your computer or private server for convenience and your ISP is on limited bandwidth, Microsoft could suck all your bandwidth dry.

Yeah I'll stick with LMDE6 and my numerous forms of offline storage 😊

Yeah. This crap really pissed me off. When I found out that half the stuff I thought was on my computer was in the damn cloud and not even a copy on my computer.

I was wondering why I keep having to turn off this cloud feature after every Windows update.

I'm glad I have been daily driving Linux for a few years now. I'm comfortable with the platform and couldn't ask for more. I do miss a few tools, but I'd just have to run those in a VM. (SourceSDK, Gamemaker Studio, etc etc) Windows is PooPoo and I hate it now.

Even if you turn it off, all your data has already been sent

First, I disabled One Drive, then online I deleted everything on One Drive. Next, I deleted One Drive from my Apps. including my Registry. Then I removed all of the pinned One Drive icons in File Explorer. Next, I went into the User file on C: Drive and pinned those folders to File Explorer. No One Drive, No problem!

Problem is MS keeps moving the goalposts for this kind of thing, and it's getting more annoying to keep up with as the years go by. Reg edit this disable that uncheck that and the other thing it never ends.

Just a question out of curiosity. What happens with one drive if you use some software to encrypt your data on your computer? Surely the data in the onedrive will be encrypted?

This is absolutely shocking. Sensitive information is often legally required to be held securely in prescribed geographical limits. Sometimes America is not one of those locations where European data can be stored. Micro$oft may well be committing a crime by uploading such data to their servers. Additionally, information vital to national security may also be held on personal computers (whether that is wise or not). If a malicious agent (such as Russia or China) blackmailed or otherwise enticed a micro$oft employee to transfer such files to them, then that imposes a risk to the security of the West. Even if all micro$oft employees are vetted, there is still the potential of a state-backed hacker achieving the same ends. We must not allow the de facto out-sourcing of data protection of vital information to a private company such as Micro$oft.

Recently had a OneDrive mess to deal with. OneDrive takes many system folders paths to use without permission. It was hell to set back when I unlinked and uninstalled OneDrive. I had to use registry changes because it refused to change back paths...Documents Desktop etc. Why on earth does it need to default to saving on OneDrive vs local? So hard to sync to Cloud without making changes like this? Also It couldn't backup in use outlook mail files. No VSS support?

I love Linux and am a prolific distro hopper, right now I have LM 22 Beta running on bare metal. I also use Windows 11 Pro, I use an "answer file" or unattended xml file to uninstall almost every piece of Windows junk during the installation. It is a night and day experience. The only drawback is I have to install an alternative for every single thing from the calculator to the text editor but, I don't mind spending the extra time in exchange for a pleasant experience.

Everyone complains if you use a account, onedrive is defaulted enabled (Im very sure local account does not have a issue) on Windows 11! Meanwhile on ICloud by Apple, that is default enabled aswell using AppleID account, there is no one complaining about it... Isnt that Very weird, that no one complains on Apple IOS/Mac but everyone complains on Windows 11? I raelly dont like OneDrive and something Windows 11, but come on, there should be complains on Apple aswell!

It sucks because Windows really is a usable OS for the masses, but it just has to be tainted with corporate greed the likes of which is only possible because they are rich and have a monopoly. So many people don't realize they are being exploited. This would be downright illegal but they can just get away with it. :/

But it's not illegal because "YOU signed the eula!". I hate that excuse.

Never happened to me because I always block one drive on any windows device I use, but it's a very good reason to move to linux.

Somebody needs to sue the crap out of them. This seems illegal af. If not criminal, then civil.

Fill your OneDrive with large goatse images to the brim.

I recently purchased a refurbished Lenovo laptop from Best Buy for $130. It had Win. 11 installed. Every time I try to save ANYTHING it defaults to their one drive cloud! I have to select c/user/my name/my files (photo, music, videos) It's frustrating. It's getting to me saving everything to a couple of usb drives then deleting it from my laptop. I do also have a laptop with Win. 10 and an older laptop with Mint (LMDE)

by not fill up you one drive with nonsense text or empty video files?

Consider Zorin OS. The UI is outstanding. Want it to look like Windows 10,11,7 or Mac OS, it does it. Highly customizable .

It’s worse than you think. I worked for a charity helping disabled people with IT (we have all now retired). We switched to Linux after the problems with Millennium Edition throwing away the TCP-IP stack and found it worked well for our clients. Some years ago a client wanted windows so that’s what she got. She was sent a memory stick containing music, following the written instructions (which were perfect) she tried to copy it to her hard drive. The was then informed that the music had now been moved to her Microsoft cloud storage, she wasn’t aware she had such an account. We were called in to help but there was no trace of the music on her machine (we looked) and the memory stick was blank. Gone. Irreplaceable. She stayed with it, and we did try and trace her ‘cloud account’ but couldn’t find it. Windows 10 then tied itself in knots during an update and basically stopped working. She then accepted our original offer of Linux (and Libre Office). Never had another problem. Personally I refuse to deal with Microsoft systems, too much like working with Putin & Associates.

All I can say is that I am glad I discovered this when loading Windows 11 onto a new gaming machine I had just built versus a machine that actually had extensive private data on it.

So that's why all of a sudden I've got 36 GB being uploaded to OneDrive. It's every goddamn time I turn my computer on.

Hasn't turned on mine. Created a bootable usb with live Win11 with local accounts and they have nowhere to store my stuff since I haven't linked this system to any MS account. And I probably never will.

Has Linux figured out how to install files with one click like setup.bat or install.exe or do you still have to type like a 1980's pc to install something, just wondering

Someone in microsoft made a mistake of turning on onedrive instead of the usual spydrive that automatically downloads your files without telling you for years now, lol.

Off topic, but I had an old work laptop take 2 hours just to restart... 2... HOURS... on Windows 10. Now that it has Linux, it runs like a million bucks.

Mine was turned off as i have my own back up NAS drive the the other week i got pop ups telling me my one drive space was full, must have been turned on by an update an update i didnt permit my laptop to do, it did it on a restart

They turned it on after many times shutting it off then I realized a bunch of files were missing. I was in a panic. Found them later when I realized what they did but im so done with windows.

We use a next-gen firewall and we can see Windows devices sending data to Microsoft using Skype even though Skype is uninstalled from the machines and nobody has ever used it.

This is infuriating. We've sleepwalked right into mass surveillance.

It gets even worse for anyone not a citizen of the U.S., because Microsoft has to turn over any information any of those three-letter agencies ask of them, and non-U.S.-citizens have basically no legal protection against that. With these "cloud services", i.e. your data on foreign servers, the question of jurisdiction arises, i.e. where is your data stored, and who therefore can access it under that legislation.

When advertizers can know exactly which porn filenames are on your desktop.... When the police can sort-of-google at your lawsuits and other content between you and your lawyer before you or your lawyer have time to read it... When microsoft can deinstall tools you PAID FOR whose DRM servers died, so you can't have them again...

I like how Tux fell from the sky in the intro lol

I'm still dual booting at the moment. I'd love to do GPU passthrough using QEMU, but I only have 1 GPU, and my motherboard is a mATX board so my GPU covers up the other PCIe slot. So I have to dual-boot at the moment but it's rare that I have to. Linux is my daily driver and has been for over a month now. Games run great under Proton, even Elden Ring on my lowly AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX-1660 in Wayland. I'm running Arch Linux using Garuda KDE minimal edition. It meant I had to install all the gaming stuff myself, but at least I was able to control what was there without having all the extra bloat from the Dragonized edition of Garuda. I can run some apps in a VM, but some need full access to my CUDA cores and there isn't really a good alternative right now under Linux. Running in a VM, the app works, but when it's trying to process videos, it has to use the CPU instead of the CUDA cores. So what would take 30 minutes under bare-metal Windows takes over 2 hours using nothing but the CPU. Plus, I'd hate to do GPU pass-through for the GTX-1660 just to run games under QEMU. Not sure if that would be better or stick with Proton. I don't play multi-player games where the anti-cheat doesn't work under Linux as I mainly play single-player games. Linux has come a long way since the early days of the 90's when I first started using it. Back then, I played Doom and Quake and luckily, ports were made of those to run under Linux and they ran great. But these days, Proton has been awesome!

Just noticed this yesterday after have a pc for a year. I thought that everything that I had on my desktop was stored on the PC just to find out that all that was on the cloud instead so I started migrating all the stuff back to my pc for later move to Linux

Okay, but how can I use Clip Studio Paint and Moho 12 and my other apps? Tuey are not working on Linux, I can't work then on my pc 😢

I discovered this a year or so ago. I deleted the backed up files from onedrive. The next Windows update took forever because it copied them all again when it did the update.

And a week later I switched to Linux. I still use a Windows 11 VM but I setup a local account by turning off networking through VirtualBox settings during Windows setup. I also do not keep any files on the VM. All of my files are accessed through the network and are stored on either my Linux host or my MacBook Pro.

Some peopl have limited Internet usage per month. The activity of one drive might stop those people from doing important things. Like watching a video on cpr or uploading documents for school/university.

I really don’t know why the media is just now getting around to this topic. I had a secondary win 11 laptop since early last year that was sending my desktop to one drive. I had to rip out one drive and alter the registry to move the desktop folder back to the user directory, where it belongs.

Microsoft did this nonsense to me, which permanently made me a Linux user. I went into Linux figuring mastery would take about 10 years. Several months of reading, watching videos, trial and error, the computer I am typing this on is rock solid with Mint. I have 3.5 tb in my Steam library, nearly 100 percent of my games are smooth as butter. Going to try running Windows 10 in a virtual machine for any music software I can't get to work in Wine, that way I can quarantine my machine from Microsoft, or at least limit their access to the rest of my machine. Better yet, try running my music software in Windows 7 in a virtual machine. I'll have to try that, probably would work just fine.

They do not give enough storage space for my data. Or is it now unlimited.

"Not doing anything illegal" right, until a government agency makes a new regulation, rule or law, a judge makes a unique interpretation of a law.

I have an OLD Windows laptop. How can I install linux on it? Currently running Vista (IKR?). I am "upgrading" it to a newer version of windows, if that helps at all. Any suggestions would be welcome.

i dobt see problems with require ms account i downloaded iso from official ms website using they tools and withount any tweaks i have option to setup withount internet. maybe its because i live in eu

I just reinstalled Windows on my work machine with scripts that happened during installation that stripped Windows down so much that it didn't even come with note pad, much less one drive.

Dumped windows 15 years ago and never looked back

Yeah Im still on Win10 and all these cloud backups and encryption it just forced on me in an update literally kept crashing my just built PC..i was furious. It's taken me the last few days to undo all of this crap.

You should never allow any program or Windows to tell you where to save your data. I have never saved to the default folders, so they can switch on OneDrive until they are blue in the face, but they will never be backing up my vital files to their cloud.

I have deliberately deleted one drive on several occasions. Even went to the site to remove everything. However it keeps coming back after their updates. It is incredibly annoying. And it’s very hard to restore your desktop after it has been transferred to one drive UPDATE Onedrive is back on my computer and my desktop is INSIDE onedrive now. There does not seem to be any way to actually get rid of it permanently.

Beautifully said mate. Subscribed.

It's not that “You have nothing to hide”, it really “Why should Microsoft be allowed in the first place?”

I'm switching now, but am learning the hard-limitations of Linux with Wayland/no Wayland, and my NVIDIA graphics card (which I need). I'm still testing the limits (I only just heard about Wayland a week ago...), but I am stuck on dual-boot for a while.

This is a breach of trust, this should definitely be a class action lawsuit

Strange iCloud try the same thing, every time you do a Iphone or iPad backup it automatically reverts to iCloud no matter how meany times you change the setting

no, just like i didn't consent to them putting my * ahem * *homework* folder on onedrive (as well as my ACTUAL homework) I actually have 2 decently sized drives, so them doing that is unnecessary and also kind of not okay. I also couldn't get my innapropriate content off of onedrive and when I did, it was gone forever (because cloud storage is a bitch)

Google did the same when it "backed up" my pix without permission after an Android operating system update changed the permission settings without warning

I just installed Win 11 for a test. When I got to choose language and currency part I chose world currency. From there the shift F-10 oobe\bypassnbo trick worked. No ms account required. I unistalled one drive without problem, turned off the ads in settings. It was surprisingly easy. If people can't figure out how to do this, how are they going to get along in Linux?

Ran into an OEM HP laptop today that blocked Shift+F10, no way to bypass the online requirement. I had to use a custom ISO created via Rufus to create a local admin account off the bat and a fresh install of Windows. Still had to connect but bypassed the MS account requirement.