Technology

They really haven't. Their onboarding flow has included this exact type of forced option for advertising data, location data and bug reports for what now? A decade, give or take? They have a very specific design language for these.

Plus, and I keep reminding people of this and they keep forgetting, they already made this feature once. It was on Windows 10, it was called Timeline, everybody turned it off and they never did much to change that, instead just adding a less intrusive offline version of it and ultimately removing it by the launch of 11 until... well, now.

What I don't understand is why you guys are so set on this specific list of grievances. You don't need to dismiss the improvements they are making. They are improvements and they are a good thing.

If you are set on rooting for or against OSs (and why would you, stop it, that's weird) you can instead just point out that... well, the feature itself is still garbage. Even with a default opt out, even assuming it's fully secure. It just covers no valid use case, unless you're starring in Memento II. It remains a security vulnerability because social engineering and shared computers are a thing. It is exactly as dumb and useless as Timeline was, and there's a reason nobody remembers that happened. The lack of AI search really, really isn't why that failed.

You don't need to come across as a paranoid conspiracy theorist making up slippery slopes to keep criticising this about the things they are actually fixing. There are plenty of valid issues with it at a fundamental design level they are not changing. Being so wildly speculative about the eeeeevil corporate MS lying to us just makes the criticisms sound less valid when the actual thing they are doing is still pretty useless at best, and most likely really bad.