From the screenshot, it doesn't even look like there's a way to get rid of the "error message"... short of doing what Microsoft wants.
Anyone who works at Microsoft brave enough to comment...?
Anyone who works at Microsoft brave enough to comment...?
Approximately 200,000 people work at Microsoft, and I can assure you that the vast majority do not hold the authority to make decisions like this. In reality, I suspect that many of them view this kind of user interface/user experience as unfriendly and express their concerns to higher-ups, but without any influence, they may never see any improvements.
Given this fact, I would recommend rephrasing your request to call for a Microsoft executive to clarify this decision. However, you probably already know the answer to that question: engagement, which leads to promotions, which leads to more money.
I regularly feel disgust at some of the decisions I see the OS and other consumer product teams roll out. It makes the company look bad, and I believe hurts our long term best interest by cheapening our product and brand, let alone the ethical perspective of dark pattern or depriving users control over their own devices.
I know of no way to turn these off short of using an older version of Windows. I think some of the enterprise releases may have ways to create local accounts, but they may still hit this, I'm not familiar with that side of the world. If there is third party software to mitigate this I encourage it. If this drives you to linux I encourage and am encouraged by it. If you pirate out of protest I encourage it. Consolidation and other related factors in the OS marketplace have rendered consumers with very little real leverage, and this is not a state of affairs I am happy with.
To guess's point, I can also say that I know of no coworkers happy with this or who have any power to impact this state of affairs. I am not in the OS org, but I would be surprised if it were any different there. To put it crudely, incentives are a bitch.
What would they even say? "Yeah, we think our users are stupid and we don't respect them, so we use dark patterns to dupe the suckers into giving us PII and $$."? It's intentional deceit by Microsoft IMO.
It's the same thing with OneDrive. If you don't set up OneDrive you get nagged by the "security" center that your files are at risk because they're not "backed up". However, OneDrive isn't a backup. It's sync and, if you factor in files-on-demand, can end up being the only copy of users' files. I wouldn't consider the only copy of my files a "backup", but most users don't understand, so Microsoft is happy to stretch the truth (aka lie) to get people using OneDrive so they can convert them into subscribers.
It's why Windows 10 will be my last Windows.