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Comment by andymoe | Hacker News Reader

They tried to be funny but it just came off as condescending. This is honestly more annoying than the oculus account switch to Facebook for me because it’s mostly my kids that play offline and the MS accounts ask for a crapload of information.

I’m starting to think ms should be forced to spin Xbox and gaming out to a separate company (along with azure and all the big three Public clouds honestly) so they can’t do this kind of harmful unified account thing to increase their data harvesting.

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> MS accounts ask for a crapload of information

You can set up children accounts, linked to yours. This is nice because it requires minimal information and allows you to set parental controls.

Well I guess I can do that now that I have to get a new account... I don’t really use parental controls. I just block their devices entirely when they don’t listen and right now they use them in public space of the house since they are pretty young. Might experiment with the safe dns stuff from cloudflare at my router.

It seems to me that linking accounts provides a lot of information, especially special children accounts.

I recently found out that to enable screen time features in Win 10, each of my kids need their own Microsoft account. A tad bit annoying, imho.

Windows 10 home is so annoying. If you accidentally connect it to WiFi first when setting it up and click through the wizard it won’t let you proceed/go back without a ms account unless you block the network connection at your router.

Yep, now I have to unplug my computer everytime I install Windows.

Thankfully Proton is removing my requirement to use Windows.

Yeah wow that does not come off well at all.

It's not good but MS allows to have multiple MS accounts meanwhile FB obviously bans. It's still far better than FB. FB also requires to upload personal info.

> MS accounts ask for a crapload of information.

The only information you need to provide for a Microsoft Account is recovery email or phone, name, and birthday if you reside in a country with a law governing minors on the internet.

What information are you referring to?

Perhaps it’s been a while since I signed up for a Microsoft account. Sounds like it’s changed... before they wanted full mailing address etc.

That takes me back, I remember trying to switch my (then) Windows Live ID to the United States so I could test Skydrive. In doing so I was locked out the the account since I didn't have a US postal address, with no way to revert my actions. I don't think I was even a teenager at the time

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