I hope this submission is flagged and removed. Just because you don't like Microsoft doesn't mean such misrepresentation is okay.
I don't think we know the motivation of the submitter and we should not assume any motivation beyond introducing the link to the community to consider and discuss the content.
The article is very brief and seems to highlight that the designer suggestion needs to submit your slide content to make the suggestion. The question as to whether we consented suggests that we have (through the usual click through), but, to me, it is really asking something like 'do we understand the implications of our decision to consent?'.
I don't see anything being misrepresented nor do I infer there is some sort of anti-Microsoft (nor anti-anyone/anything) in the article. It does seem to suggest there is something for people to consider in that we often 'consent' without really thinking through the outcomes of what is supposed to be our willing, informed consent.
Too often we split into binary extremes when we should really take time to be thoughtful and considerate of questions being posed and where that consideration takes us and helps us to find insights and opportunities to improve ourselves. I encourage people to not automatically jump to our 'team position' (whatever that is).
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/53c77d7b-dc40-45c2...
Considering it has to be explicitly enabled and includes a privacy policy, I’m going to say it’s “blatantly obvious” to the user.
In short, I pretty strongly disagree. I think that if you had a hundred users look at that page or click through enabling the feature, and then asked afterwards how many of them thought that the feature was going to send their slides to Microsoft, at least 50 of them would be very surprised.
If to use the feature you are explicitly asked to turn it on, with an option to view a privacy policy, that is “blatantly obvious”. It isn’t hidden or buried under a dozen other settings when you install PowerPoint, it’s done at time of use.
How, exactly, would you want it to be more obvious? A big red box every time the feature is mentioned in the help site? Be realistic here; in terms of user consent this is perfectly fine.
I disagree.
> How, exactly, would you want it to be more obvious? A big red box every time the feature is mentioned in the help site?
Yes, more or less. I would be perfectly happy with a single red box at the top that says this feature sends the contents of your slide to Microsoft. I am not okay with linking to a privacy policy that nobody's going to read and pretending that that's informed consent.
As a user I'd like the ability to opt-in/out of this. I much prefer a privacy policy that captures all of it for the app. Otherwise, I have red boxes showing up non-stop using most apps. Can you imagine the sheer number of red boxes you'd get for Netflix the first few times you use it!
Of course it's impractical in today's environment, but I think we'd be in a much better place if we'd established early on the idea that a piece of software that massively violates your privacy (which is to say, all of them, nowadays) comes laden with a terrifying number of red boxes when you read its privacy policy.
[1] https://slidehunter.com/how-to-automatically-design-slides-w...
I don't know the wording for the dialog itself, so I will comment on this wording instead.
Asking permission to "get design ideas for you" is absolutely wrong. They are asking permission for the wrong thing. They should be asking permission to "collect content from your slides". They can then explain that the upside is that in return you get access to design ideas.
Depending on the context of the dialog an appropriate wording would be something along the lines of this: "In order to access design ideas, up-to-date slide contents need to be regularly sent to Microsoft servers. <Agree> <Cancel>".
edit:
- Would you like some chocolate sprinkles with that ice cream?
- Sure!
- Cool, <while sprinkling chocolate on your ice cream> it will cost $100 and your left kidney.
This statement asks for permission to fetch data, not to upload my data.
Uploading data based on this statement is a blantant violation of customer expectations, so obvious you don't need to be neither a ux expert nor a lawyer to see it, you just need to read carefully.
Can Microsoft use some other setting in Windows as justification for bypassing the permission step?
> get
We're not worried about get, but about send. Funny how they managed to omit the most worrisome term from their permission dialogue, huh?
Now, is it a glaring red pop-up? No. But IT department's can also choose to disable the feature if they don't want their company to use it.
I suppose it could/should be more obvious/explicit on the Designer pane itself, something like "This is an online feature that uses Microsoft's servers to generate recommendations", or a more user-friendly language.
Note however that the article is light on details; does it send a full content of slides? Some hash of text and images? A non-identifiable abstraction of layers involved? This could be done well or poorly.
(I don't think the submission should be flagged FWIW, but I agree that it's not of good enough quality to deserve great ranking; but that's of course subjective:)
I also believe it can be managed by policy.
MS FTE here, I have no direct awareness of how the feature works and am not affiiliated with Office - but I'm sad that something meant to _help_ people (if this raises hackles, I don't want to see what the OP says about the accessibility checks) is used to bludgeon my colleagues publicly.
We don't really know yet if your data/powerpoint content is sent to Microsoft, or if Powerpoint just goes out and looks for layouts, fonts, etc. without communicating any of your text.
This is a pretty huge exaggeration here. Closed rooms exists and are used when appropriate.
And just because something is enabled in the consumer version by default does not imply it's enabled and available in enterprise settings. Last time I dug through the office GPO templates - basically every phone home feature was easily disabled on an org level if desired.
Further - what do you think something like Google Slides is doing with your data? It's ALL stored on Google's servers by default.
If this claim was posted as a HN comment without citation or further explanation it would likely get flagged, why are submissions held to a LOWER standard?