Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year (hardware.slashdot.org)

🤖 AI Summary
A OneDrive user discovered a new face-recognition setting in the app that Microsoft says can only be turned off three times per year — and attempts to toggle it sometimes fail with “Something went wrong.” Microsoft confirmed the feature is in a limited preview but gave conflicting messaging on its support pages (calling it “coming soon”) and declined to explain why the opt-out is rate-limited. The company offered to investigate toggle failures for that user and pointed to its general privacy statements and GDPR/EU data-boundary commitments, while saying OneDrive inherits privacy controls from Microsoft 365/SharePoint. The episode matters because it surfaces tensions between usability, consent and biometric processing: face recognition on cloud-stored photos involves sensitive biometric data, and a constrained opt-out (plus buggy toggling) undermines user control and trust. Privacy advocates argue such features should be opt-in and editable at will; limiting changes to three times a year could create real harms for people who need to rapidly change settings. For developers and policy watchers, this raises technical questions about rollout/back-end state management, consent logging, and regulatory compliance — especially in jurisdictions where opt-in consent for biometric processing is required.
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