The best part is Windows doesn't even notify you about it. It will show you numerous useless notifications and now even ads, but it won't notify you that it has encrypted all your data. As that would be too "intrusive".
I already know of one case where all data was lost. Somehow recovery key was not stored in Microsoft account.
I think it's absurd this kind of thing would be enabled by default without very explicit warnings about the possible reprucussions of not backing up your recovery keys
And, since Microsoft likes to pretend an account is required to even install Windows now, most people will likely have a linked account.
This kind of thing should be super-explicit when setting things up, and they should provide a way out.
Of course that means I'm constantly bugged about using one.
Hence you'll often notice UEFI updaters turning off bitlocker.
I've seen HP devices tell you what the value of PCR0 will be for each given update, meaning you can know beforehand what that will be, and prepare by locking measured boot to that value before rebooting.
In Linux with systemd-measure, there's an option to lock to a signed manifest for PCR11, so you can have updated kernels (UKIs, for example), able to boot, while still locking the measured boot to the kernel image, initrd, cmdline, and public key used to sign the values. At that point, your OS distribution (or yourself) can take control of that process. It doesn't help for firmware updates though, as far as I know, unless you can prepare and ship an updated PCR policy, and your OS distribution is unlikely to be tightly integrated with your hardware vendor to do that, so it will likely fall onto the user, or to unlock the disk while doing those updates.
They all would much rather have the disk exposed to anyone with physical access and have their data recoverable in the much more likely case where the PC suffers physical damage or some other kind of software/hardware failiure.
Account passwords and session tokens can be reset, photos of loved ones can't can't be retaken
Account passwords and session tokens belong to secure local storage anyway. For personal PCs unencrypted personal data and encrypted secure local storage would make most sense as default configuration IMO.
Also is "on by default" the right wording for something that needs a registry change to turn off? That just seems like it's forced with a workaround that they'll remove at some point.
Last point, does that mean that windows is going to take a massive speed penalty going forward since they also default to their slow software encryption over hardware encryption?
Man this kinda blows. I'm hoping that W12 will have all this Vista-esk transition crap sorted out by the time it launches.
There are so many problems with this that are stupid but that's par for the course when it comes to tech corps these days, they have all the leverage, so their fuckup is your problem, and what is this customer support you speak of.
Don't hold your breath on Microsoft actually improving any of its offerings.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/bitlocker-encrypts-self-en...
Let's say you encrypt the drive, and then travel outside the country and come back. The border patrol officer says "I want to see everything on your hard drive" and you refuse, being an American citizen and all.
They call Microsoft and recover all the data...
A lot of people are about to have nasty surprises the next time they reinstall Windows because their kid downloaded some malware and realize their data is all gone.
If they started offering reasonable ways to opt out of all telemetry and advertising (ie: without buying enterprise/using third party software and crossing your fingers) I could almost be tempted to dual boot for the games/software that don't run well in wine/proton.
I wouldn't be particularly opposed to paying for the privilege either, but don't make me buy X copies to be eligible.
Theoretically this was already on for “new” devices since sometime in the Windows 10 timeframe.
Very few people have backups... OTOH, SSDs tend to fail as bricks with no hope of any data recovery.
