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

https://lzon.ca/posts/other/microsoft-user-abuse/

110•jpmitchell•1h ago

Comments

selectively•1h ago

Cloud Storage being enabled by default is not abuse, and the vibecoded slop from a YouTuber that is unwisely recommended in that blog post makes a bunch of negative changes to Windows installs, including disabling specific security policies.

If you don't want OneDrive, uninstall it. That's available in all regions, for all users.

If you are seeking to be able to uninstall Edge without hackery, forcibly enable Digital Markets Act mode. This is done by copying/pasting powershell.exe into the same folder it normally is (to bypass the User Choice Protection Driver), running it as admin and punching in:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Control Panel\DeviceRegion" -Name "DeviceRegion" -Value 0x0000044

Open Control Panel and you can uninstall edge. Bing will show up as a thing you can uninstall in Settings - Apps. Non-Microsoft Inbox apps will not download, Copilot will not download, etc. Ads will not show up. The user selected default browser will be respected. Laws: they work!

Enabling DMA mode is massively safer than running some YouTuber's slop script.

Forgeties79•56m ago

>uninstall it

Go tell all our parents to navigate that process. Microsoft is very insistent on their using onedrive.

selectively•53m ago

Open the screen where you remove apps and click the uninstall button.

ijk•16m ago

Show me how to uninstall it, because I've tried and failed.

dev_l1x_be•54m ago

p99.999 user meets p50 users reality. If you don’t like this post on HN close the tab.

selectively•52m ago

When an awful post gets botted to the top of HN and I see it, I will call out the awful post if I so feel like it.

asdefghyk•52m ago

RE "...Cloud Storage not enabled by Default ..."

The issue is that Microsoft is moving users files to its cloud with out explaining to people CLEARLY what is happening. And getting their customers agreement. And this deception, in MY OPINION is obviously by design , meant to grow their cloud storage revenue thru upgrade offers

If Microsoft was doing it properly, it would be CLEARLY explained to customer what was to happen and getting their agreement. to store files in cloud.

Having used computers , since late 70s, Microsoft has a very long history of dodgy actions for their own benefit and at detriment to customer

selectively•51m ago

OneDrive seems pretty clear to me. It works identically to the way the same functionality works under macOS.

Fabricio20•50m ago

I dont know if it works like macOS since I dont use macOS - but it's not a simple copy-to-cloud. It actively replaces file handling in those folders, which breaks a bunch of applications like games that save stuff in Documents/My Games..

selectively•48m ago

The way iCloud Desktop works is that it uploads your stuff to the cloud, using your iCloud Storage quota.

The way that OneDrive works is that it uploads stuff to OneDrive, using your Microsoft 365 storage quota.

wtallis•38m ago

Is the "Desktop & Documents Folders" sync option in iCloud on by default? I've never used that feature, and it's a bit buried so it's hard to enable accidentally, but I haven't set up a new Mac from scratch in a long time so I don't know if it is a trap for new users the way OneDrive is.

selectively•34m ago

It is on by default as of the last time I went through new Mac user setup, which was during....Sequoia, I think.

Fabricio20•51m ago

Somewhat related but I was talking about the OneDrive thing yesterday with a few non-tech friends and it has backfired so many times it's insane. OneDrive seems to take over the folder handling in windows for some reason, instead of just copying the data to the cloud. Any game you play puts stuff in My Games under Documents and you just installed windows? Yep, its gonna sync your entire FFXIV patch files into the cloud, that's 180gb of patches as the launcher downloads the game. tmodloader? Yep and then it's going to fail to launch the game. Skyrim and Starfield save data? Yep. Literally had to help someone troubleshoot that yesterday and the fix is just to uninstall OneDrive so the folder becomes a normal folder again. Had the ffxiv issue myself and the funniest part was getting a notification from microsoft to update my storage plan because it was full... I dont think people would be so much annoyed by OneDrive if it worked like other sync apps that just.. copied your file to the cloud. And maybe if it wasn't an annoying pop-up when you installed windows and didn't set it up (if we logged in, just set it up automatically and dont bother the user), etc..

asdefghyk•49m ago

RE Uninstalling Edge. There will likely be some unintended side effect - is my experience

selectively•48m ago

Nope. This is an officially supported function, required under law. Edge WebView remains present for functionality that requires it.

sonzohan•45m ago

Your ad hominem attacks aside, The point the author is trying to make is that Microsoft is actively using dark patterns in an operating system to get them to buy things.

If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"

PowerShell and most CLIs are terrifying to non-technical people. Literally Here Be Dragons. The layperson might be skeptical of a YouTuber telling them to run a dodgy script, but in the age of "delete system32" people sure as hell aren't going to run a command as admin that a user on a random forum recommends they run.

Stuff like this is why I have moved all of my systems except my gaming PC to Linux.

Edit: no seriously look at this notification https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907... Grandma absolutely does not understand what that means, She just knows she doesn't want to lose photos of her grandchildren.

asdefghyk•40m ago

RE "....If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"....."

The implication here is, OneDrive is backup . It is NOT. Moe Microsoft dodgyness ....

jmclnx•38m ago

>Cloud Storage being enabled by default is not abuse,

I disagree, taking my data without explicit permission is stealing and abuse.

>If you don't want OneDrive, uninstall it

I heard if you do that, it gets reinstalled. Is that true ?

> you are seeking to be able to uninstall Edge without hackery

Per people I know. using Firefox you will be constantly nagged to use Edge. I never used Windows so I do not know if that is true.

Taking my data sounds to me Microsoft is abusive. I liked M/S in the early DOS Days, but left when they started doing border line illegal things to grab market share. I say people using Windows should move elsewhere too.

fhn•24m ago

Yes it is. You start your brand new computer and put files into it only to find out all that is stored on their Cloud without your consent. That's literal digital theft and fraud.

Bratmon•55m ago

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.

dijit•52m ago

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 stronghold for sure, but Gamers are inconsequential when compared to the amount of business computers and consumer systems people buy.

Chromebooks were the answer for most consumers, but damn, that business moat is basically damn-near unkillable, especially in Scandinavia. (I'm currently subject to it myself).

Bratmon•50m ago

Exactly! They've gotten very good at mark-identification over the years.

fl4regun•17m ago

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.

jjtheblunt•45m ago

if using windows in 2026, it might be that you are leveraging the device driver maturity while running your favorite Linux in WSL2.

mehdibl•51m ago

So to free up space you delete folders instead of moving your familyvphotos that you don't have backup.

Can we stop a bit this all evil Microsoft fault?

And the author have a solution. Yeah those headline are buzzing.

TheOtherHobbes•47m ago

I had a similar issue. I ended my O365 subscription. Outlook kept complaining I had exceeded my free storage, which surprised me because I've never used OneDrive for anything, and my email storage was well under the limit.

I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage.

Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files.

OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them.

Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem.

But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work.

I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away.

This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.

asdefghyk•44m ago

My Suspicion - Microsoft would have put lots effort into their cloud storage trickery - it would be an enormous revenue item . ....

asdefghyk•47m ago

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

fhn•26m ago

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.

kn100•46m ago

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 file. I gave up in the end as nothing in there was particularly important. This is an incredibly annoying default.

kn100•43m ago

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!

antonvs•14m ago

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.

lumiukko•42m ago

I wouldn't use the webui for that. Getting rid of onedrive in favor for a self-hosted nextcloud, I used the native client to download all the files on the machine and then moved them out. This also removed them from onedrive after acknowledging the "A lot of files have been deleted from your onedrive account" warning. Actually deleting the onedrive application was also not as straight-forward as some other users may want you to believe. Even now, I'm not sure it won't just pop-up one day once again.

Morromist•39m ago

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

fhn•29m ago

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.

ryandrake•20m ago

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...

jmcphers•43m ago

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 Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".

Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.

I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

dwayne_dibley•34m ago

Drives me insane that to see my existing Google library and shared albums I must allow Google photos access to my phones photos - at which point it turns auto back on.

antisthenes•28m ago

It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026.

HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).

bsder•28m ago

Apple does the same thing with iCloud. I had to go through a lot of hoops to get my wife's photos back down locally on the computer.

OptionOfT•8m ago

Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.

But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.

And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':

    1. They offer a paltry 5GB. Hasn't changed since inception, but app sizes have ... tripped? I have 2GB of health data now. 
    2. They don't tell you that you're backing up data that can be retrieved elsewhere.
    3. The popup when storage is full shows only 'buy more' or ignore (no link/mention to disable individual app like described above)
    4. No way to backup to a NAS
    5. No way to backup to a computer automatically. You have to provide you passcode every time.

debugnik•27m ago

> 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.

devindotcom•24m ago

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.

pimlottc•13m ago

Disabled in the sense that you can no longer receive email (which for many is the primary purpose for a Google account), not that you can’t login.

dijit•5m ago

FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.

devindotcom•26m ago

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

liendolucas•38m ago

From the WinUtil screenshots presented in the article I'm absolutely shocked about all the things that you pressumably want to turn off or delete to have a "clean" Windows (to some extent if that's possible at all). It's also ridiculous that you need an external tool to easily disable/remove/uninstall every single thing you don't want .

I haven't used Windows since many many years ago and the few times I sit down to interact with someone else's computer I suffer so much that after a few seconds I simply give up, I can't stand anything about it.

If someone were to use Windows, besides WinUtil, are there a set of recommended open source scripts to clean up all the shit out of a fresh Windows installation?

Just to be aware in case of emergency or extreme need...

geophile•36m ago

From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.

bsder•29m ago

> maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

If they're on Office 365, they could be on Linux.

reddalo•11m ago

Linux Mint is super easy to use. I've personally battle tested it with my elder parents.

Given all the nagware present in Windows 11, I'd even say Linux Mint is easier than Windows.

The most difficult part is probably the installation itself.

ImPostingOnHN•18m ago

This is part of a larger, financialization-related push 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 with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.

carodgers•13m ago

I don't use Windows at home. What happens if you don't have Outlook but your personal local files still fill up OneDrive storage? Do you get error messages that files aren't being backed up? Are you unable to save files?

cute_boi•11m ago

even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.

aucisson_masque•10m ago

> Microsoft is actively hostile towards its users.

No shit.

And I see some of the same pattern with Apple now, for instance by default files on iOS get downloaded to the iCloud. And phone get backed up too, same as photos. It just happens that the free 5gb of iCloud storage is slightly not enough for all this shit, and you quickly get a pop up showing you that you must purchase an iCloud subscription.

I know that work because my mother almost fall for it.

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