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Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

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Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#41

Post by debugnik »

jmcphers wrote: post #24

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled . What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Micro…

> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached

How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#42

Post by fhn »

asdefghyk wrote: post #19

I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.

I'm all for suing MS but you're suggesting suing because of personal ignorance? The forced use of email for setup is probably sue worthy but I'd rather people just stop using MS.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#43

Post by devindotcom »

jmcphers wrote: post #24

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled . What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Micro…

Happened to me too, almost identically. Clearly this is a pattern across the major consumer cloud app/service providers.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#45

Post by devindotcom »

debugnik wrote: post #41
jmcphers wrote: post #24

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled . What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Micro…

> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.

Same thing happened to me and it did not default to lossy. Days later I got the "you will stop receiving email soon" warning in Gmail.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#46

Post by ryandrake »

fhn wrote: post #37
Morromist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have seen onedrive do this to people who aren't super-heavy computer users. Onedrive is a menace.

you mean Microsoft is a menace. Microsoft has been tricking generations of people into using OneDrive. I hope nobody is dumb enough to pay for it and I'd create a ton of fake emails and fill it up with junk.

Microsoft constantly tries to trick[1], annoy[2] and coerce[3] users into using their software.

1: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

2: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-...

3: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#47

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

This is part of a broader, financialization-related push across the entire economy to convert one-time-purchase revenue into steady, predictable, ratchet-able recurring revenue.

As an added bonus for them, they can sell laptops with less storage (= fewer chips in this tight market) with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#48

Post by fl4regun »

dijit wrote: post #9
Bratmon wrote: post #4

Email scammers often make their initial emails intentionally full of red flags to automatically filter out anyone smart enough to avoid the scam, and leave them with a pool of people willing to accept any amount of scummyness and abuse. Windows is the exact same thing but for operating systems. If you're still using it in 2026, it's because you want to be a mark.

99% of people don't choose their OS. They buy "a laptop" and it has an OS on it. Or they go to work and are provided "a computer" and have very little say (or ability to change) what it's running, even if they had the impetus, know-how and knowledge that other things even exist.. you're always running the risk that things will break for you. This is the moat Windows has. Not Games like people think, that's a strongho…

For real, the tools at my workplace either all work on linux already, or we just do most of our work on AWS linux VMs over VNC anyways, but our laptops are all windows. I'd rather have debian or fedora or whatever on my laptop but IT doesn't care, and they already have everything set up on windows. My laptop doesn't even matter, it basically only needs access to a web browser and it would be fine.

The gaming moat is ever shrinking, at this point it's really only for games that explicitly choose not to support linux (very few in number), or have decided that kernel based anti cheat is the ONLY one worth using (few in number but some can be quite popular). Single player games have been working great for me for many years now, but I don't play stuff like apex legends, league, valorant etc.

Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

#50

Post by antonvs »

kn100 wrote: post #25
kn100 wrote: post #20

I got caught out by exactly this, and I'm not exactly tech illiterate. what made it even more annoying is by the time I'd realised what had happened, it was practically impossible to get the files back out of OneDrive (since I decided that this was enough Windows for me, and went back to Linux), since the webui does NOT handle downloading lots of small files well, and you just end up getting a partially complete zip…

Oh and another fun thing! I eventually just emptied the OneDrive so Microsoft would stop bothering me. This was maybe six months ago or so. Microsoft confirms I am storing nothing there. Just a week or two ago I got yet another email begging for money because my OneDrive was apparently full. It was a genuine email, I went as far as checking the headers for SPF/DKIM. When I signed into onedrive, still empty!

I suppose if you’re not paying them, your storage limit is zero, so if you have zero bytes there you’ve reached max capacity.
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