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Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

You did consent to it, in the fine print. Unfortunately.

Not even. It’s an explicit feature that must be separately enabled, and requires Microsoft 365.

> The first time you try out Designer, it may ask your permission to get design ideas for you. If you want to use Designer, select Turn on.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/53c77d7b-dc40-45c2...

Plus there are policies which allow admins to block PowerPoint Designer, as well as all Office 365 "Intelligent Services" (or "Intelligence Services", depending on your POV).

> it may ask your permission

I wonder when that is? Because I haven’t used PP yet, and it didn’t ask me. Of course, we use Office 365, and maybe my boss turned it on globally?

Does anyone know where the setting is?

Have you used the Designer feature? That’s what’s being talked about. It should prompt you when you first use it.

If you’re on a work account, your admin may have enabled or disabled it already with GPO/MDM.

> Have you used the Designer feature?

Yes.

> If you’re on a work account, your admin may have enabled or disabled it already with GPO/MDM.

It has to be a global Office 365 setting, my computer is not in the domain, I’m the only admin for it. That’s why I’m asking where the setting for the permission is, so I can have a look at it (I’m secondary admin for the O365 account) and potentially disable it.

Do you have Microsoft 365? It's a requirement for the feature.

It's part of "connected experiences" so this is the article on GPO: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/manag...

On a Mac, one thing to note is:

> If the user has an Office 365 (or Microsoft 365) subscription and is signed in with a work or school account, or if the user has Office LTSC Standard for Mac 2021 or Office Standard 2019 for Mac, then the user can't turn off connected experiences that analyze content.

No, no M365, only O365. And again, no group policies.

And M365 is not a requirement because the Designer function clearly works on my machine.

It will ask you to turn on "Connected Experiences".

If I have one hope for the future, it's that 'accepting' click-through corporate EULAs containing unconscionable terms that few read will no longer be considered consent.

Which is why GDPR has the concept of "informed consent", which is a fancy way of saying "consent hidden in the fine print doesn't count".

And that the user may not have capacity to consent.

That seems the salient issue today with regards to children and social media. Most of the giant social media companies profit from participants who cannot legally enrol.

By "participants who cannot legally enrol," do you mean minors? I'm not tracking what the Venn diagram between those people and those who "may not have the capacity to consent" is.

EDIT: I was talking about kids.

But Dogbert's comment actually deserves a bit more than "try using common sense instead of set theory" :)

I tried thinking of classes of adults who lack capacity, other than the mentally unfit, senile or criminally insane.

There's a lot of young people who are "deemed to consent" (the passive weasel-words of filthy scoundrels) in higher education. I've written about Turnitin in the Times and the "very dodgy circumstances" in which students are inducted into university and then find themselves coerced into tacit agreement to use tools which massively violate their privacy and other rights. The same applies to Microsoft products where institutions block choice and force students use insecure products that they would refuse if exercising their better judgement.

When installing office, you are told in the fine print to go read: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement ... it counts. The verbiage in there is quite disturbing.

It doesn't count anywhere that is protected by GDPR.

> protected by GDPR

This is like the firewall in windows 95: nice but useless.

Many companies have gotten their first fines already. Hundreds of millions of shareholder value down the drain because they blatantly ignored the rules.

No, most companies don't get a massive fine in the first round, but I already see enough have gotten then that even Google now allows me to opt out with a single click :-}

I wish I could disagree with you.

GDPR technically does have real teeth, to the extent that one really shouldn't want to raise the ire of an EU Data Protection Authority. Unfortunately, enforcement to date, and the resulting fines, have been lackluster at best. When will people learn that disincentives like fines and such have to actually hurt to be effective in changing the behavior of corporations?

How willing would a government be to prosecute a company its IT infrastructure relies on?

Even if you think Microsoft doesn't have kill switches, it still isn't obligated to do business with them.

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