Analyzing and tagging photos is not free. Many people don't mind their photos actually being tagged, but they are a little more sensitive about facial recognition being used.
That's probably why they separate these out, so you can get normal tagging if you want without facial recognition grouping.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/group-photos-by-p...
If you have a large list of scenarios where Microsoft didn't respect privacy settings or toggles, I would be interested in seeing them.
I know there have been cases where software automated changes to Windows settings that were intended to only be changed by the user. Default browsers were one issue, because malicious software could replace your default browser even with lower permissions.
Are you talking about things like that, or something else?
Then why they are doing it ? Maybe because CIA/NSA and advertisers pay good money.
Most moms and old folks aren't going to fuss or understand privacy and technical considerations, they just want to search for things like "greenhouse" and find that old photo of the greenhouse they setup in the backyard 13 years ago.
It's one thing if all of your photos are local and you run a model to process your entire collection locally, then you upload your own pre-tagged photos. Many people now only have their photos on their phones and the processing doesn't generally happen on the phone for battery reasons. You CAN use smaller object detection/tagging models on phones, but a cloud model will be much smarter at it.
They understand some of this is a touchy subject, which is why they have these privacy options and have limitations on how they'll process or use the data.
In a really sad way.
Nobody. Absolutely nobody. Believes it's to save poor little Microsoft from having their very limited resources wasted by cackling super villain power users who'll force Microsoft to scan their massive 1.5 GB meme image collections several times.
If it was about privacy as you claim in another comment, it would be opt in. Microsoft clearly doesn't care about user privacy, as they've repeatedly demonstrated. And making it opt out, and only three times, proves it. Repeating the same thing parent comments said is a weird strategy. Nobody is believing it.
Maybe in your social bubble. I don't know anyone with OneDrive subscription.
Aren't these 2 different topics? MS and big-tech in general make things opt-out so they can touch the data before users get the chance to disable this. I expect they would impose a limit to how many times you go through the scanning process. I've run into this with various other services where there were limits on how many times I can toggle such settings.
But I'm also finding a hard time giving MS the benefit of the doubt, given their history. They could have said like GP suggested that you can't turn it "on" not "off".
> As stated many times elsewhere here .... Nobody really believes the fiction
Not really fair though, wisdom of the crowd is not evidence. I tend to agree on the general MS sentiment. But you stating it with confidence without any extra facts isn't contributing to the conversation.
Nobody really believes the fiction about processing being heavy and that's why they limit opt outs.