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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

#51

Post by ryanjshaw »

LeonB wrote: post #43
ryanjshaw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try having a kid and segregating funds for them while paying for their Xbox Game Pass and a Minecraft Realm with your account. I have 25 years of Windows software development experience and I was almost reduced to tears just trying to understand what I'm even trying to accomplish. Realms is still in some kind of half subscribed, half not subscribed state and it still asks for my account's PIN for purchases but actual…

I witnessed an egregious bug once - where logging in with one users name and a different users 2FA let me in. I just looked for my notes on it and can’t find them. I’m happy for you not to take my word on it other than to say — I concur that there are some egregious bugs in this area!

I completely believe you - I have performed this setup twice, on different machines, and in both cases the end result is that it uses the kids PIN to authenticate despite requesting the adult's PIN.

I have no idea where to report the issue to (Microsoft store? Minecraft support? Microsoft Windows support?), and having dealt with Microsoft support in a professional capacity I know that even if I do figure out where to report it that they will waste weeks of my time asking me to explain the issue and then claim it's working as designed without understanding the problem at all.

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

#52

Post by dustedcodes »

theK wrote: post #42
gchadwick wrote: post #26

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 s…

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

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

#53

Post by userbinator »

I'm assuming "deletion of your data" only includes any information that might be associated with the school... hopefully not the rest of my Microsoft account!

Whenever I see such a serious warning, I will almost always take a long period of consideration before proceeding. Remember that you're dealing with a company which acts like they believe you shouldn't own your computer. If a company with that attitude believes they should warn you about something, it's certainly serious.

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

#54

Post by kissgyorgy »

dustedcodes wrote: post #52
theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

"Because it's cheap." Lots of "leaders" don't see much further than that...

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

#55

Post by amatecha »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

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 devic…

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the product, nor NVIDIA's online product page, indicated that an Android account is strictly required to actually use the product. I ended up doing some more searching after returning the product, and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it. Gotta love it...

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

#56

Post by userbinator »

nvrspyx wrote: post #36
sundvor wrote: post #3

Microsoft's organisation vs use of accounts is certainly a hot mess.. I'll be watching responses here and hopefully find out why my personal account sometimes says certain settings are managed by "my organisation". What freaking organisation is always my response; I've never been able to figure it out.

I've changed things in Group Policy (e.g., disable Bing/web search in Windows search) because there's no user-facing setting to disable some things and mine says the same. If you've done similar or used any debloat/privacy tools/scripts, that's probably the cause. Additionally, go to Accounts in Settings and double-check that you're not logged into any "work or school" accounts. The one thing I can't stand is that if…

A single button that says "Yes" with no question mark anywhere in the dialog is definitely a dark pattern.

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

#58

Post by elsjaako »

dustedcodes wrote: post #52
theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

They don't consider any alternative to be viable.

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

#59

Post by alpaca128 »

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 jump to questionable conclusions here. They just meant that Microsoft messing something up to this degree is not a big shock to people who already had MS related issues.

Some of their designs are downright malicious (like locking the email account until you give them your phone number), more often it's amazingly bad software/UI, and sometimes they'll ruin your weekend by rolling out a Windows update without asking which wipes your partitions or throws bluescreens on boot.

I decided a while ago it's not worth it for me and stopped using as much MS related stuff as possible, and I'm glad I did.

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

#60

Post by pmontra »

dustedcodes wrote: post #52
theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Because they think that they must use Windows no matter how bad it is.
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