Of course they don't steal anything from you.<p>They just preserve your precious little soul.
To your best interest.
Which may coincidentially be in their best interest.
A friendly customer service, because you happen to honour them using their products.
And, if you're lucky, even in the best interest of people that do protect you against evil forces out there in the dark.
From time to time they may look into your precious little soul lying down on the ocean ground in an underwater Microsoft data center, to see if all is well with you.<p>Think about it, sometimes you yourself don't know you're part of those forces, but Microsoft and those other people might know.
And they can help you.<p>They are like shepherds to their flock.<p>Some may call it customer profiling, customer-retention or even vendor lock-in, mass surveillance and other ugly terms, but I tell you it is love.<p>Yes, pure caring and love.
You may not understand that at first.
Like Apple had to learn bitterly recently.
But I tell you, in the end, with their help, there will be just shiny happy people around you.<p>Amen.
Happened to me about a week ago. When I opened the browser, a notification popped up telling me "Your bookmarks are now being synced". There was an option to turn this off, which I did, but I have to assume that the bookmarks were already sent off to Microsoft.<p>There's nothing remarkable in my bookmarks. I've never really found it to be a useful tool beyond a way of marking things I want to check out again soon. I don't use it for day to day links. I do recall going through this with Chrome and Firefox in the past when they pushed syncing as a huge wonderful benefit for me and I had no interest at all. I'm sure some people have bookmarks as part of their personal workflow and are grateful to have this syncing ability for multiple devices. That's great for them but all vendors need a very strick opt-in policy, not a "we're so sure you're going to love this that we turned it on for you" scheme.
Anyone know if this sort of thing happens with enterprise users of Microsoft? Exfiltrating user data would create a shitstorm at one of my previous employers.
One of the comments on that link has offered this URL where Force Sync is mentioned.<p><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-p...</a><p>To me it's absolutely mind boggling the amount of text in that link.<p>There are nearly 100.000 words, which is the same as:<p>A 100,000 word count will create about 200 pages single-spaced or 400 pages double-spaced when using normal margins (1″) and 12 pt. Arial or Times New Roman font.<p>Reference
<a href="https://capitalizemytitle.com/page-count/100000-words/" rel="nofollow">https://capitalizemytitle.com/page-count/100000-words/</a>
My Windows system is used only for gaming and I have a strict rule that it cannot log into anything but gaming related content like Steam etc. No actual accounts or credentials ever go into that system.
Hint hint hint: this is not about bookmarks, it's about privacy and respecting user's choice.<p>It happened to me too. And then they used this data to show me creepy ads.
If true, I don't understand how this is surprising. Google has been using all possible tactics to convince users to give them ("sync") all their data, including bookmarks and passwords. So from the point of view of Nadella, why should MS be any different?
Seems a bit late to make hoopla about a much more minor infraction.<p>With Onedrive I'm facing the nightmare that you are not allowed to configure it until syncing is in progress. If you pause syncing immediately on install, you're not allowed to change settings to prevent said syncing from happening.<p>I have a mix of personal and business data on there. This has been the case for a few years now but recently got worse. Basically, I don't want my hard drive contaminated with this data when going through customs, that's why I am traveling with a FRESHLY FORMATTED AND REINSTALLED laptop. And what does MS do? Coerce me into all this data's metadata touching down on a drive I have no intention of ever letting touch it. Makes my blood boil. It's a well documented fact these idiots in customs will infringe your privacy for shits and giggles and harass you about stuff that has nothing to do with any valid legal concern. Thanks Microsoft.