Or if you don’t trust Microsoft to begin with, just use Veracrypt, it won’t upload your recovery key anywhere, but will help to make a recovery usb stick.
Additionally, the problem above was not some kind of “unhealthy paranoia”, but disliking Microsoft and then still creating an account for some reason, one that they deemed to be a throwaway account. Question is why did they do that (oh, because Microsoft made it hard* to skip registering an account? That can’t be! Microsoft is trustworthy and anyone thinking else is just unhealthily paranoid, right?), but also how should have the user known that this was a dangerous thing to do? Don’t tell me they should have read the dozens of pages of dry legal text.
*Yes, it’s hard if it’s not an option in the installer. How the fuck you look it up when you don’t have your computer?
If you’re at that point of not trusting a company, the best practice would be to avoid using their devices or connecting them to your network.
There are plenty of other ways to track and identify users, a company could conceivably bake whatever the hell they want into the operating system and doesn’t need to rely on you creating an account with them to achieve that objective.
I used the term “unhealthy paranoia” due to the logical fallacy that is at play.
Then don’t?
If you still want to use Windows and use their encryption solution, manually enable Bitlocker and store the recovery key yourself.
There are also third party encryption options.
Or if you don’t trust Microsoft to begin with, just use Veracrypt, it won’t upload your recovery key anywhere, but will help to make a recovery usb stick.
Additionally, the problem above was not some kind of “unhealthy paranoia”, but disliking Microsoft and then still creating an account for some reason, one that they deemed to be a throwaway account. Question is why did they do that (oh, because Microsoft made it hard* to skip registering an account? That can’t be! Microsoft is trustworthy and anyone thinking else is just unhealthily paranoid, right?), but also how should have the user known that this was a dangerous thing to do? Don’t tell me they should have read the dozens of pages of dry legal text.
*Yes, it’s hard if it’s not an option in the installer. How the fuck you look it up when you don’t have your computer?
If you’re at that point of not trusting a company, the best practice would be to avoid using their devices or connecting them to your network.
There are plenty of other ways to track and identify users, a company could conceivably bake whatever the hell they want into the operating system and doesn’t need to rely on you creating an account with them to achieve that objective.
I used the term “unhealthy paranoia” due to the logical fallacy that is at play.
Yes, that would be the best practice. However there are a lot of best practices that cannot be followed for one reason or another.