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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#21

Post by makeitdouble »

LeonB wrote: post #8
LeonB wrote: post #5

The way Microsoft accounts work is almost completely opaque to users. I’ve been in similar scenarios — the switch directory or switch organisation technique usually worked for me - but wasn’t enough for this person. They never really give you enough information to tell what’s going on… maybe it’s a security risk to have consumers who are anything other than bewildered Kafkerian characters struggling against a faceles…

Now, if Microsoft bought Atlassian — that would be absolute theoretical maximum limit of peak confusion when logging into an app. “Warning: You are about to login to Microsoft Atlassian Fogbugz Trello. Have you cleared sufficient space in your calendar, notified your next of kin, put your affairs in order, and taken your sedatives?”

The fun part being it always looks fine and smooth for the first 30 minutes.

It's once your sessions start expiring or you're trying to use the other services in meaningful ways that the journey begins.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#22

Post by zamnos »

greggsy wrote: post #12

Despite the implication of malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft, this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. Nonetheless, I would have expected MS to ensure that the process includes clearer guidance for the account owner, and for deliberate decisions to be made by the school to enable this type of action. They did a very good job of provid…

But the schools IT team shouldn't have been able to do this! I don't ascribe malice to them, but if, in the regular course of me doing my every day normal business at my bank, their website ended up with me taking your money out of your account somehow, the blame wouldn't lie with me or you, it would be the bank's fuckup.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#23

Post by xxs »

greggsy wrote: post #12

Despite the implication of malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft, this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. Nonetheless, I would have expected MS to ensure that the process includes clearer guidance for the account owner, and for deliberate decisions to be made by the school to enable this type of action. They did a very good job of provid…

>malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft

Giving such permissions to a 3rd party could be just a gross incompetence instead of malice. Yet, it should never happen.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#24

Post by capybara_2020 »

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do.

Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines.

Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also.

We really need to separate authentication from services and devices. With strong safe guards around that account and an actually support system.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#25

Post by Brian_K_White »

LeonB wrote: post #8
LeonB wrote: post #5

The way Microsoft accounts work is almost completely opaque to users. I’ve been in similar scenarios — the switch directory or switch organisation technique usually worked for me - but wasn’t enough for this person. They never really give you enough information to tell what’s going on… maybe it’s a security risk to have consumers who are anything other than bewildered Kafkerian characters struggling against a faceles…

Now, if Microsoft bought Atlassian — that would be absolute theoretical maximum limit of peak confusion when logging into an app. “Warning: You are about to login to Microsoft Atlassian Fogbugz Trello. Have you cleared sufficient space in your calendar, notified your next of kin, put your affairs in order, and taken your sedatives?”

Like you would get anything as considerate as a warning.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#26

Post by gchadwick »

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a state where teams would just refuse to sign in and you'd need to reinstall it to get it to work again.

Trying to be actively signed out is also a mess. You can use the teams app to join teams meetings others have setup and invited you too without teams access yourself. Though of course if you have an MS account teams can see it ends up trying to use it and then saying you don't get teams access via that account and trying to sign out and join the meeting with an account associated with it often just doesn't work. A colleague actually ended up requesting he got an o365 account with teams associated with his corp email because of this issue as he had occasional meetings with external people over teams. We have a corp o365 setup for our ops/admin team that engineering normally doesn't touch but because he had a teams invite sent to his corp email he got dragged into it.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#28

Post by Alphaeus »

zamnos wrote: post #11
jackjeff wrote: post #7

My rule of thumb is to NEVER use a Microsoft account for anything unless I’m forced to. And then I’ll create a brand new account for each use case. I so regret converting my Minecraft account. The old Mojang stuff was so much more reliable.

> The old Mojang stuff was so much more reliable. In what way? Does the microsoft.com login system go down often?

The Mojang accounts weren't great for security. No 2FA or anything (just security questions), and if you lost your account / it was stolen, you were pretty stuffed. The only way to recover it was to present the transaction ID of your purchase of the game to support, which most people don't have and you were never told to keep. I saw lots of people get permanently locked out of their accounts.

I guess it also doesn't make sense for them to maintain a parallel login system when the Microsoft one gets (presumably) millions of dollars of investment every year. Though Microsoft accounts are more complicated to use, with configuration being split across Microsoft, Xbox, and Mojang/Minecraft itself. And it seems they like locking people out for opaque reasons.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#29

Post by lultimouomo »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #14
lultimouomo wrote: post #9

Is this a surprise? I assumed everyone's experience of Microsoft accounts was something like this. Every single detail seems designed by someone who read Kafka and took the wrong lesson out of it.

I really hate comments like this. What exactly do you expect to achieve by saying "Well of COURSE this thing is awful. You should have known that." Just accepting every horrible thing in the world must be so sad.

You don't need to accept it. Just don't use Microsoft. (If your school forces you to, create a throwaway account for that, and let the principal know that you are not a happy customer)
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