Microblog Memes

Ah, if privacy was violated and nobody heard it, did it make a noise and all that.

Hypothetical for you, to test this assertion: some sicko puts a camera in a school changeroom, gets all the footage of kids they want and removes the camera before they’re caught. Privacy was violated and nobody heard it - did it make a noise?

And yes, this is very much a non-sequitur because like I said, I’m replying only to the portion of your comment I first highlighted - not weighing in on anything else, just saw incorrect info and added more context. Also, the fact that you trust them is great, but irrelevant - notice we’ve gone back to their pinky promise where you’ve just chosen to accept it (which again, valid and I’m not attacking that choice). You also seem to be conflating the personal data (literally pictures and documents) that M$ has already stolen with the more conventional data “theft” of browsing data, buying habits, etc.
This isn’t an instance of google selling your interest in some product, it’s Microsoft having access to personal files that people don’t even know have left their computer.

Another hypothetical: an innocent person with something to hide from their tyrannical government gets a windows computer, sets it up normally and migrates their data. They of course might think their own local storage on their own pc locked behind a strong password is a safe place to put whatever incriminating evidence they need to hide, so into documents it goes (and then right onto Microsoft’s servers). Now with one request from their government, Microsoft is legally obligated to hand over their data (which they conveniently have complete access to, unknown to the innocent person). Substitute the innocent person’s “crime” and the tyrannical government with whatever you prefer, and this is exactly the “practical application” of privacy you don’t believe in. Whether it’s being LGBTQ+ in parts of the world, a political dissenter in an authoritarian state, or anything else - believing that “local storage” on your own PC actually belongs to you should not be enough to get someone jailed or killed, but it (extremely) plausibly is.
Again, this is a problem not just because Microsoft has both the key and the lock to people’s data, but also because many of these people literally do not know. They’re not choosing to trust Microsoft because “nah they wouldn’t do that”, like you are - the choice has been stolen from them.

Not of whether the data is somewhere or being used for something, but about whether it could have been in some parallel reality, where nothing short of making the data physically impossible to access is a valid outcome.

I also wanna note that you say that like it’s an unachievable goal that’s unrealistic to expect, but it’s very achievable and already reasonably common. Properly end to end encrypted cloud solutions (where the users KNOWINGLY store their files) that don’t have access to the encryption keys are out there - even Apple has one.

But there's a magnificent leap from there to "Microsoft is probably secretly accessing your cloud stored data for shits and giggles, and even if they aren't you wouldn't know if they did, so they're probably lying about it"

Interesting rephrasing of what I actually said, which was “Microsoft is capable of secretly accessing your (presumed) local stored data, with no proper oversight to actually prevent this”. I think if you reread what I said you’ll see that I stated facts (their capabilities to do these things) rather than making unprovable assertions (which would be pointless, because as previously noted there’s no way for anyone to prove or disprove that it happened). It also (in your hypothetical where it’s proven) would - according to nearly all historical precedent - lead to at worst a slap on the wrist for Microsoft. I would love to be wrong about this part, and I can only hope that someday it happens and you get to say “I told you so” lmao