How do I stop onedrive from looking at my photos

You can turn off face grouping, but OneDrive does not provide a setting that makes ordinary, unencrypted photos completely unreadable to the service.

For a personal OneDrive account:

1. Open OneDrive in a web browser.
2. Open Settings > OneDrive settings.
3. Look under Photos for People or Group photos by people.
4. Turn that feature off.

You can also disable “On this day” and other photo notifications, but that only stops the notifications. It does not stop all service-side processing.

Turning off People should stop OneDrive from creating facial groups, although existing grouping data may take some time to disappear. Menu names and availability can vary by account or region.

If you want OneDrive to store the files without being able to process their contents, encrypt them on your computer before uploading:

1. Place the photos in an encrypted archive or container.
2. Use a strong password and keep the recovery key somewhere outside OneDrive.
3. Upload only the encrypted file.

The tradeoff is that OneDrive will no longer provide thumbnails, photo search, previews or online editing for those images. Personal Vault adds extra access protection, but it is not the same as encrypting the files yourself before upload.