Microsoft!!!

I very seldom (though not never) make use of cloud-based storage solutions such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. After the Fappening many years ago, I concluded (or was reminded) that you should never put something online, including in the cloud, if you wouldn’t want malicious people viewing it. (I should note that that’s not to victim-blame. Those responsible for the leaks in the Fappening were very definitely the villains in that piece. But I still advocate taking reasonable precautions.)

I should also note that I have a small number of files on my PC that I have made a declaration that they won’t be backed up online (for data protection reasons). So this isn’t just an idiosyncratic quirk or a mild preference.

On a related note, when I first purchased my PC, I spent a fair amount of time getting it set up and making sure the settings were as I prefer. It’s not a wildly bespoke system, but it is my system that I know better than some random developer at Microsoft.

So I rather object to the tendency of Microsoft, after every “major” update, to bring up a number of screens hectoring me to accept Microsoft’s recommended settings. If I wanted to use those, I would be using those. And I really object to their position of “assumed consent” – if you don’t explicitly opt out of their suggestions, they’ll “helpfully” go ahead and do it for you.

And so it was this morning that I discovered that Microsoft had moved (not even merely copied) all of my key files off my PC and into their OneDrive service. Meaning that any security concern, real or imagined, was now in play, meaning that my data protection obligations were compromised, and indeed degrading the experience of using my PC (because some files were no longer in the location the system required – though I should be glad of that, I suppose, or it might have taken much more than two days to discover).

And so it was that I immediately had a task to undo all of this and make sure the files weren’t any longer online and were back in the locations I expected. And reconnected the library files. (It also probably means that my automated backup for this week may well be a monster – it’s all the same files with all the same content, but they’ve all been “touched” since the last backup).

Thanks guys.