Encrypt your files before upload them to OneDrive this way you use Microsoft servers and your files cannot be accessed by them to train AI and sell your personal data
Microsoft does not sell personal data. Do you have any idea how fast they’d get sued if there was any evidence of that?
You know who sells your personal data? Data brokers. But they don’t have recognizable names or market their services to consumers, so they’re less satisfying to complain about.
That doesn’t say what you think it says. Microsoft partners are subject to the same confidentiality requirements as Microsoft itself.
Of course COMPANIES will respect your data and will not profit from it. Keep believing
People follow laws. Even people who work for COMPANIES. Everyone is not out to get you.
I respectfully disagree you
There aren’t enough “got dangs” in this meme
Do I look like I know what a got dang is I just want a hotdog of a gribble. You tell me what about accessories and accessory because Alamo propane is like a got dang ladybird I tell you what
Yall do know we can just disable it right?
I don’t think they do, most of the MS doomerism I see implies they probably never tried to turn any of it off. I uninstalled one drive years ago along with turning off the ads and telemetry and its all stayed that way ever since, but I keep getting told all of it will be back with the next update. I update when it prompts me to and it never undoes my settings.
But we want autosafe, like libreoffice on my desktop.
Ok, but like i can just click a button.
Until they push some kind of update that requires you to find where they hid the button* (and it also defaults back to cloud)
IMO, this kind of meme post is from/for those that are scared and confused by settings dialogs.
OneDrive is a default, which can be changed.
They’d rather complain about it than spend 10 minutes fixing it.
I’d be really surprised if it took as long as ten minutes.
This is a setting in Excel. But Cloud is the default option.
When are we getting an antitrust for trying to cram down our throats the cloud?
The cloud doesn’t exist. It’s just some other computer that you don’t own.
People don’t get sued for shoving other fictitious concepts down our throats… Religion comes to mind.
Thing is M$ is showing you the cloud as the first option to make you use it and buy more space when you need it.
Google got sued for making the google the default chrome search engine without asking the user. I think M$ is doing the same with the cloud storage but asking you with a pen about to mark their option. And the programs don’t even remember you didn’t choose the cloud the last time.
The cloud is a shitload of computers connected in such a way that it’s far more reliable than any single computer, and so you don’t need to care about which computer is doing what.
Yes, those computers physically exist somewhere and are owned by someone, but saying the cloud doesn’t exist is just ridiculous. May as well say clouds in the sky don’t exist either because they’re just water.
That’s just it, the “cloud” is just a fancy name for a cluster that’s owned by someone else. Everything you’ve described as what a “cloud” is, has already been defined.
The term “cloud” is a marketing vapor term that loosely refers to a cluster of hypervisors. That’s how hypervisors at large scale are pretty much always organized.
The hypervisors in use are not something most people have ever heard of. The most commonly known contenders are hyper-v (which is the basic technology that Azure is built on), and VMware. But most major “cloud” providers, with the exception of Azure, are using something else entirely.
The same description you’ve provided can also be applied to modern super computers, mainframes, and pretty much anything that lives inside a datacenter.
A personal computer has a multitude of single points of failure. A single power supply on a single circuit, a single processor, with all memory controllers in that same processor, a single OS drive, a single network interface. Servers generally have multiple power supplies, multiple CPUs, multiple disk drive controllers, connected to multiple disks in some kind of raid or equivalent. Basically all single points of failure, with few exceptions (such as power management/distribution, and the motherboard) have been removed.
Then you take the servers and scale up to a whole cluster of servers and you get so much more redundancies. A cluster, when done properly is basically bullet proof for failures. Making it larger both increases capacity and redundancy. Without increasing latency. Again, when done right.
In all, “cloud” is a marketing buzzword. I don’t know of anyone in tech that calls a “cloud” by that name unless they’re talking to someone who doesn’t know that a “cloud” is fictitious.
The term “cloud” is a marketing vapor term
I’ma stop you right there. I’m a software engineer who’s implemented a lot of cloud-based stuff. It’s a term of art, not just a marketing word.
When there’s some semblance of a government that works in the public interest.
Be like the EU, at least in that regard :)
Weeeeell… While it’s not anywhere as bad as the US here, EU governments are also very much beholden to the owner class.
The cloud doesn’t exist. It’s just some other computer that you don’t own.
People don’t get sued for shoving other fictitious concepts down our throats… Religion comes to mind.
I’ve commented on this meme before. All I’m going to say this time is that OneDrive has redeeming qualities. The way that Microsoft pushes it, like many things Microsoft has pushed lately, is pretty shitty.
Quickly: good examples of shitty Microsoft pushes for what they want you to use: persistent pop-ups about upgrading to Windows 10/11 from earlier versions, making the default browser setting in Outlook/office/teams/whatever, to be separate from the system default, and that default is always edge, OneDrive… I don’t need to say more about the push to OneDrive, considering it’s the point of the post.
Regarding OneDrive specifically, you can change the default save locations for MS apps to be not OneDrive. However, OneDrive does offer benefits that are great for the less technically savvy, specifically syncing user data (mainly desktop/documents/pictures)… If you don’t need a crazy amount of storage for your images/documents, etc, then having the OneDrive backup/sync enabled is a good backup solution. The only thing you need to keep on top of is that OneDrive is actually still connected to the service (logged in) and working as intended. OneDrive seems to have this tendency to logout or expire your connection, so checking on it monthly just to ensure its still backing up is the best practice.
The benefit to this backup is that it’s built into Windows, and almost entirely transparent to the user. “Saving to OneDrive” is just putting the information into a dedicated OneDrive sync folder (usually under "C:\users(username)\OneDrive - (account name)" ) which saves locally, then syncs to OneDrive in the background using something similar to the “BITS” service (background intelligent transfer service, also part of Windows).
Since this is normally very transparent to the user, it’s good for less tech savvy people, in case they suffer a failure like a hard drive loss, system crash/failure/corruption, lost/stolen/destroyed hardware, etc. All their files are synced/saved to OneDrive and they lose nothing, all they need is a Microsoft account (Hotmail/outlook.com/live.com), and to take the 30s or so to set it up. Then use the computer pretty much normally and their data is safe from loss.
There’s an absolute shit ton of alternatives, not just from cloud storage providers. I personally use both OneDrive (personal, on a Hotmail account - free tier, which IIRC is 100G), Google drive, and my Synology. OneDrive on my PC backs up documents/pictures mainly, which I use as a sync to my laptop, and I use “Synology drive” to back up my entire C:\users\username folder to my local NAS. Google drive is exclusively used on-cloud, mainly for shared documents that I collaborate with others on; mainly financial records (no credit/debit/bank info, just costs, etc), and other tracking type documents and stuff I need to share with others.
I won’t get into other alternatives just due to the sheer number of them. Needless to say, I’m very contentious of my data and losing it. I am aware that my free/public account data might be anonymised and used to train some AI somewhere, so I tend to be careful about putting any password/account data/confidential data on a service that may have access to something I don’t want it to. I use a password manager, so I don’t generally keep login info anywhere except there.
Anyways, enough about me, I want to hear what people use for their backups!
“All I’m going to say this time is that OneDrive has redeeming qualities.” Proceeds to say several more paragraphs.
All are related to the original statement.
Automated backups and synch is all fine… The way MS does it super inconsistently and unpredictably sucks
The main thing people are upset about isn’t that OneDrive exists or that Microsoft is pushing it. It’s that updates have made it so that OneDrive folder backup is automatically enabled without user permission. Backing up files to OneDrive without being asked to. That is a privacy nightmare.
I personally host my own copy of Nextcloud and use that for anything I need to sync or back up. I have a regular back up job that snapshots the Ceph cluster it uses for storage and copies it to my own NAS box here in the house, which is automatically replicated via a Nebula network (like TailScale or Zerotier but fully self-managed) to an identical NAS at my parents’ house across town.
It does ask, but often the Yay, thanks for changing my setting that I didn’t ask you to change button is much more prominent than the Wtf I didn’t ask for this put it back how it was button, so people think they’re being told rather than asked and just confirm it without realising they had a choice. Also, a lot of people just click the Next/OK button without reading and are surprised by the consequences. It’s not a major difference than just changing the setting of people don’t realise they’re being asked to opt in and can therefore opt out, but it is a bit of a difference.
Hostile UX design. The “yes, make this change I don’t want” is often highlighted in a brightly colored button, meanwhile the “no thanks” is often grey or a simple link looking option, not dissimilar to what you would find for help.
They make it seem like you don’t have a choice when you absolutely do.
Having a choice in what software does is actually a big highlight for me with Windows, apart from being aggressively persuasive in getting people to do whatever they want you to do, in the end, you are given a choice.
They’re slowly eroding this away though, starting with local accounts, and I’m sure much, much more will follow.
With Linux, the only option you get is to customize your experience. Often defaults are either not apparent or not given, so you kind of stumble around trying to figure out what to do, unless you really know what you want, it can be a terrible experience.
Mac is customizable… With one big asterisk on that. You basically need to be a very advanced user to really customize anything beyond whatever the mighty blue Apple wants you to be able to do. You’re given a short list of “options” and if you want anything beyond whatever is sanctioned by Apple, here’s the command prompt, good luck 👍
Windows has been in this middle ground for a very long time. Not as free as Linux, with recommended settings across pretty much every piece of software, and defaults that generally work and provide a good experience in general. They might not be optimal, but they work. You have the option of basically doing whatever the hell you want, within reason, without having to get a PhD in computer science to do it.
With Mac, you either fit into the Apple ecosystem box, or we’ll make you fit.
Linux has no box. No walls, no limits, no rules, not even a guideline. Figure it out yourself.
… At least, that’s my take on it. I’ve used all three to some extent for various purposes. Mac is awesome when doing everyday things, a lot of what you need is abstracted away and “just works” ™, so thinking is at an all time low. Windows is very meh, it does what you want, but it’s like a moody teenager at times. It’ll just go to hell and you’ll be left to figure out wtf is going to fix it. I use Linux mainly for servers, but the UI/UX for it is essentially the aesthetic of Windows 9x/2000, but after you’ve taken LSD. When you need to get anything fixed, here’s your console, good luck. Don’t forget to sudo.
New installations of windows do not ask, and simply enable it
My fetish is sending a document as a copy and then seeing someone edit it in realtime while I’m in it.
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I think they mean Linux
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I’d like to… Spend some time… with some witches. Know which woods?
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I’ll take my chances.
For the uninitiated (like me before searching for this):
That’s incredible. Gonna try this out when people mention being sick of windows bloat
Gotta combine this with the massgrave activation script to give Microsoft the ultimate finger
switch to Linux or deal with it.
I don’t understand the hatred of OneDrive. Your documents folder redirects to the OneDrive folder. I guess you have a piece of software that has the documents folder hard coded? Be mad at that software.
If it lost your files after constantly fighting you about where to save them, you would.
Plus the whole not asking to install, then begging for money to upgrade a service you never asked for. Until you finally have to waste hours learning how to completely disable it and get it off of every machine you own…
That breeds some resentment.
I want to have granular control over where my files are stored. If I want them stored in the cloud, I want that to be a choice I consciously make, not something that’s defaulted at the operating system level.
So the hatred isn’t really directed at OneDrive, it’s directed at the fact that the operating system is making decisions for me, and they don’t line up with what I actually want my computer to do.
I haven’t used Windows in a few years (and never used OneDrive), so pinch of salt time, but…
I don’t like the idea of M$ having direct access to all of my files and personal data
That and, there have been mishaps with OD deleting files
Also, i personally don’t like software automagic, especially when i don’t understand what is going on under the hood
Is OD just a folder? Where are my documents actually stored? What happens if my internet goes out? How much do i trust M$ to not bungle something or sell or leak my files?
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This. Straight up this. Just fucking use Linux, it’s ready for casual everyday use.
No, it isn’t.
Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.
Can you provide an example of this? Only time I’ve encountered that behaviour was with a laptop that had a defective lid-switch.
Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.
LOL it absolutely is not. Not even close.
In what way is it not? It has a desktop, a browser, free app for a word processor. For the CASUAL user it’s fine. Just don’t go into the terminal, like you wouldn’t for the command prompt.
“Why does my .docx document look all mess up on my computer?”
I can open .docx just fine with LibreOffice.
Hell, even if you do go into the command prompt it’s pretty easy if you’re on something Debian based, apt is really easy to get a hang of.
Hardware compatibility. I have one machine that won’t boot any Linux installer at all. Another with constant gpu driver problems. Another where Bluetooth doesn’t work at all. Another where wifi firmware crashes all the time. It never ends.
Tell me you haven’t used Linux recently without telling me you haven’t used Linux recently.
I use it every day across many machines. Still continue to have serious hardware compatibility problems with a wide range of devices. It’s extremely frustrating.
I realize not everyone’s experience is the same, but it can still be a really bad time for some people. Maybe the same can be said about Windows too but I still think it’s not as bad.
Remember, hardware incompatibilities is very often the issue because we don’t have many users so many don’t care about Linux
The more people use Linux the more drivers will come. The better hardware will work
My mother and aunt picked up on it just fine, they’re actually enjoying it more because there aren’t full screen ads that confuse them and it made their computers faster.
Bro I actively challenge you to install Mint and have problems with it. It’s nearly impossible. Worst case you’ll need to wineskin some niche Windows-only game or program, but honestly even that isn’t necessary all that often in my experience. You’re going to have a no-stress install finished in a quarter the time that a windows install would be, and a robust OS that apes the windows environment to such a degree that average non-technical users won’t have any idea they’re even using Linux.
Barring some sort of hardware incompatibility that I haven’t experienced personally, I’ve installed Mint on around a half dozen machines in the past several years and have yet to recieve a complaint from the end users. It just works.
Seriously. I’m pretty sure my housemate hasn’t noticed the difference between Mint and Windows. At least they haven’t asked me to help them with anything in over a month, and they would have, if they needed help.
I’ve been daily driving Mint at work for a few months and I love it. It was painless to install, and I like all the GUI/DE stuff better than windows. It also has better multi-monitor support than when I boot into windows.
But it’s still Linux so all the techy development shit works great too. I’m always in the terminal, etc.
the problem is always hardware incompatibility.
Mint installer does not boot on any machine I have.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it’s booted it’s amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.
I might set it up as my daughter’s first computer. She’s getting to that age already so it’s about time to do it
Had some windows users loving the Cinnamon DE on Mint. They managed to get right into it straight away. Plus, on most Linux distros they come with easy to use package managers. And you can still get deb or rpm packages that can be used to install applications just like a windows installer exe.
Yawn. Yelling at people to just use Linux is ineffective and it comes across as really condescending. It also does nothing to address the issue if how disruptive it is to switch operating systems, especially for less technical users.
if you think FOSS makes anything better for the average user, especially UX, I have a bridge to sell you.
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I had to run an alias every time I wanted to change the brightness on my laptop, and it defaulted to max brightness every time it was restarted.
I get that if I was a better person I could just pull myself by my bootstraps and teach myself to sync the brightness buttons on the keyboard to work again but I’m not. On windows it just worked.
unwillingness to learn
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It’s not that they won’t learn, it’s that the alternatives literally can’t do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio… crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can’t do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It’s not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it’s huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
This is one reason I’m still paying my monthly Microsoft dues. I’m an advanced [I guess] Excel user and none of the other spreadsheet programs out there can do everything Excel can do. At least not easily.
So I’ll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he’s looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he’s retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon og stability, there’s a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there’s plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn’t click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it’s provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I’d wager it’s why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I’ll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we’re using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren’t a monolith.
I fundamental thing that makes FOSS better is not the product that exists, but that, when you see a problem, you have the option to think, “let’s see how to fix it”.
Now I have used MS Excel for most of my life, up until University end, and only recently started using LibreOffice Calc instead.
And despite me telling all my colleagues how much better the new versions of LibreOffice fresh are, I know very well that there are still some glaring problems in these programs even in general use.
However, I had experienced some problems in MS Office too and back then all I could do was feel powerless for a few seconds and then either find some workarounds or ignore the problem, depending upon what it was.
In case of LibreOffice, I can make a note of the problem and plan to report a bug and maybe even help fix it, which leaves me on a +ive note at the end of the day.
Digression: Problems with LibreOffice:
- Calc: Using click+drag on the vertical scrollbar in case of even as low as 800 records, causes lags during the scrolling.
- Writer: Images cause slowdown. This has been a major issue for a long time and you can probably find some discussions related to this, floating around.
A lot of people are also just dumb. FOSS won’t fix dumb.
Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
People don’t know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
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On
my Android phonethe Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.
Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
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At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says “When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers”
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
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Well going to .local/share/… Isn’t very Intuitive either. Try asking someone who’s new to find their Steam Directory.
Try going through.your registry and disabling one drive
My cousin sister lost all her files to a malicious script on her pendrive. The unreliable pile of crap called OneDrive didn’t even back up properly, and well, Windows has gone so bad, it’s terrible,laggy and slow on a Ryzen 5800U with 8GB of RAM. I wish she was open to learning Linux desktop environments.
I wish more people were open to learning how to properly configure Windows for family members who will likely never switch to Linux.
That shit situation sounds entirely avoidable.
Somewhere, a Genie is howling with laughter at the magnitude of that wasted wish.
I set up my 90 year old grandmother with Ubuntu; she was extremely open to learning. If somebody’s got to learn something, then why not the more useful skill? That’s better for the user, the teacher, and society at large.
Even a lot of young people are simply unwilling to learn something different if there’s any way to avoid it. Your grandmother is not at all typical.
In my family we make fun of those people
“Your house, ahahah, nice one! By the way, rent is going up. How much was ‘your’ raise this year?”
Less than the rate of inflation 😮💨 guess I make less this year than last year.
UMMM ACKTUALLY I’ve got several charts that say you’re richer. You must be lying or lazy. /s
FaMiLy InCoMe Go Up MeAnS YoU aRe Ok!
…ok, but I’m a “family” of one and your stupid fucking metric is counting multiple incomes as one…
The insurance that costs you $200/month, COULD have cost you $700/month (if you chose this exact plan from this exact provider on your own without HR negotiating a bulk discount)
So, you’re not losing $200, you’re EARNING $500!!!
The moment a lawyer saves their medical records in a way that unintentionally and without their consent uploads them to OneDrive, they have a pretty solid case to charge Microsoft for a HIPAA violation.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/onedrive-hipaa-compliant/#
Totally feasible to use onedrive.
However I’ve got no sympathy for even a small business to use IT without someone configuring their system in a way that controls this. A lawyer of all people know that knowledge is worth something.
It is feasible to CHOOSE to use OneDrive and take all the proper precautions. We’re talking about home users getting OneDrive data uploaded without their consent through their “push assumed default”, and “giant popup, tiny cancel” setups.
The article you link only says it’s okay when using a OneDrive business plan together with a signed agreement.
You should be, if you’re in a work computer with privileged documents, controlling it with an appropriate level of care. No matter Linux or Windows. If you’re using home and defaults, you’ve failed no matter what.
We’re not talking about work computers. We’re talking about patients - end users who have downloaded documents from their doctor.
These people should not be blamed for using defaults, or for insecure actions happening from their inaction.
I said home computers multiple times and you again replied about work environments. You need to start paying attention.
The moment a lawyer saves their medical records in a way that unintentionally and without their consent uploads them to OneDrive, they have a pretty solid case to charge Microsoft for a HIPAA violation
Are we talking about the same comment?
Lawyers, once they take off the suit and go home to their kids, are end users, not businesses. It would simply be easier for someone to initiate the lawsuit if they have a background in law.
Ah you’re thinking I’m reading your other comments to other people.
BTW HIPAA is for providers for their patients information handling. Once it’s in the person’s hands, it’s no longer under HIPPA and it no longer applies. If you decide to put your private medical information on a commercial advertisement board on a highway, and it’s not breaking laws to do with acceptable adcertisement (eg gore or smut) you’ll be able to do that to.
Basically theres no expectation for a individual person to adhere to HIPPA for their own personal information storage and it doesn’t apply.
My assumption with your lawyer comment, is this was a insurance or otherwise medical malpractice lawyer who might collect this information for their client cases, since without having client/patient requirements, HIPPA is irrelevant.
HIPAA doesn’t even require encryption. It’s considered “addressable”. They just require access be “closed”. You can be HIPAA compliant with just Windows login, event viewer, and notepad.
(Also HIPAA applies to healthcare providers. Adobe doesn’t need to follow HIPAA data protection, though they probably do because it’s so lax, just because you uploaded a PDF of a medical bill to their cloud.)
HIPAA applies to whichever entity consciously chooses to move/store data.
Generally, after a patient downloads a healthcare-related item, they are that entity - and as the patient, they have full control/decisions about where it goes, so they can’t violate their own HIPAA agreement even if they print it and scatter it to the wind.
BUT, if your operating system “decides” to upload that document without the user’s involvement, then Microsoft is that entity - and having not received conscious permission from the patient, would be in violation. It’s an entirely different circumstance if the user is always going through clear prompts, but their more recent OneDrive Backup goal has been extremely forceful and easy to accidentally turn on - even to the point of being hard to disable. As you said, encryption has nothing to do with it.
LOL. You really think Microsoft doesn’t have an army of lawyers ensuring they comply with laws like HIPAA?
When they’re specifically writing business plans designed for hospitals, sure, they can likely account for it. But not when designing end user services that are laissez-faire about user data privacy - on the random things people put in “My Documents”. As with many organizations, it’s very possible the two parts of the corporation don’t talk to each other.
That’s not how it works. Microsoft knows Windows will be used in medical settings. They know “but it’s a product for home users” won’t be an effective defense if they cause a HIPAA violation.
They also should “know” that being forceful about backup prompts, AI features, and major version upgrades will irritate users into switching off their OS, and yet they’re doing it anyway. Logic is not driving their actions; greed for data is.
Microsoft makes is money by selling products and services. Your data is not nearly as valuable as you think it is.
No. Microsoft is not liable, at least when it applies to HIPAA.
The HIPAA Rules apply to covered entities and business associates.
Individuals, organizations, and agencies that meet the definition of a covered entity under HIPAA must comply with the Rules’ requirements to protect the privacy and security of health information and must provide individuals with certain rights with respect to their health information. If a covered entity engages a business associate to help it carry out its health care activities and functions, the covered entity must have a written business associate contract or other arrangement with the business associate that establishes specifically what the business associate has been engaged to do and requires the business associate to comply with the Rules’ requirements to protect the privacy and security of protected health information. In addition to these contractual obligations, business associates are directly liable for compliance with certain provisions of the HIPAA Rules.
If an entity does not meet the definition of a covered entity or business associate, it does not have to comply with the HIPAA Rules. See definitions of “business associate” and “covered entity” at 45 CFR 160.103.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities/index.html
If that reality isn’t depressing enough, there’s also Clouds KOTH edit by Aliantos.
