“People section: One Drive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos to help you find photos of friends and family. You can only change this setting 3 times a year.”
From The WinePress @ substack
Microsoft continues to force new features that cannot be easily bypassed or turned off. Following the company’s decision to close a loophole that no longer allows users to create local analog accounts, but now rather must create an online-active Microsoft account, Microsoft is now forcing facial recognition to use its popular OneDrive app – a cloud storage and synchronization app.
Strangely, the latest update says this function can only be turned off three times a year, so Microsoft says.
“People section: One Drive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos to help you find photos of friends and family. You can only change this setting 3 times a year.”
Windows Central explains:
On the Microsoft Support website, the company describes the feature as “collecting, using, and storing facial scans and biometric information from your photos through the OneDrive app for facial grouping technologies … When you turn off this feature in your OneDrive settings, all facial grouping data will be permanently removed within 30 days.”
Microsoft is also quick to highlight that the feature is never used to train AI models, and the data collected is only ever used to help improve the feature for the individual user that has enabled it. Face data is never shared outside of your account. “Microsoft does not use any of your facial scans and biometric information to train or improve the AI model overall. Any data you provide is only used to help triage and improve the results of your account, no one else’s.”
AI face recognition in OneDrive is a feature that has been rolling out for quite some time, and it appears to be enabled by default when it does eventually reach you. It’s still in limited preview, so not all users will see it just yet, but it is concerning that the support webpage for the feature seems to imply that the feature can only be enabled or disabled three times a year, even if that’s not the case.
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Photo credit: pixabay.com
