MicrosoftMicrosoft, with all due respect, what the heck are you guys thinking there?
For context, I have just had this feature rolled out to some of our Windows 10 Pro non-domain joined PCs on 20H2.
Firstly, how did this feature even pass testing? Whenever you mouse over it, it hijacks 1/4 of the screen real estate, which is very annoying.
Secondly, do you care to elaborate how the data gets personalised despite having every privacy setting already enabled and using a 3rd party browser (Firefox) with all of it's privacy settings, including uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger extensions enabled?
Thirdly, why has this new feature been pushed out of band and not with the 21H1 update? Isn't the whole point of the 6-monthly feature update to enable the new features? so Why was it enabled outside of the feature update when these kinds of changes could be expected from the feature update? And the Insiders only tested this on 21H1. The correct thing to do would have been to enable it with 21H1 only because this has not been properly tested on prior builds. If someone really wanted it on a prior build (for some reason), it should be a deliberate act to enable this functionality path.
Fourth, how is it exactly that features are silently being enabled on our PCs without even as much a log in the Windows Update interface? Is there a log of these silent enablements somewhere? Is there a news feed to subscribe to so that we can be aware of any silent enablements/disablements which could be coming our way or do we need to sign up to every Microsoft blog in existence and hope to stumble upon that information with less than a months notice? If we experience an issue as a result of a change, it makes it a lot harder to troubleshoot when you are not being transparent about the actions you are taking on the state of our PCs.
Fifth, from the tone of the most in making it "easily" managed and then providing all these tools for IT admins to disable it, it sounds like you already know and anticipate that most users would not want this useless feature which only gets in the way, so why did you even inflict it on your users in the first place? Thank you for even working new features at all, I'm sure a few fans like it, but I'm sure that anyone who would actually want it could simply just turn it on.
Sixth, following from above, what is the setting which we can deploy to disable all feature related enablements similar to this one in the future, so that we don't get a repeat of this where we are forced to react after the fact? I understand that sometimes some performance/compatibility/crash etc. fixes get silently (refer to Point 4 why this is wrong) but those fixes are actually good, I want those fixes to keep coming (just not silently), but we should have more control to be able to prevent the unnecessary/feature related enablements from coming through. You know that we are just going to turn it off anyway, so why do you even waste your time and ours trying to force it on us, when you know that we are going to disable it anyway.
Microsoft, please do better. You are just hurting your customer's trust when you pull stunts like this.
