alt Hacker News> Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account.
Once the feature exists, it's much easier to use it by accident. A finger slip, a bug in a Windows update, or even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory, could all lead to the key being accidentally uploaded. And it's a silent failure: the security properties of the system have changed without any visible indication that it happened.
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This is correct, I also discovered while preparing several ThinkPads for a customer based on a Windows 11 image i made, that even if you have bitlocker disabled you may also need to check that hardware disk encryption is disabled as well (was enabled by default in my case). Although this is different from bitlocker in that the encryption key is stored in the TPM, it is something to be aware of as it may be unexpected.
If users are so paranoid that they worry about a cosmic ray bit flipping their computer into betraying them, they're probably not using a Microsoft account at all with their Windows PC.
>even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory
Stats on this very likely scenario?
Oh, no accidents needed. Microsoft will soon forcibly extract and upload keys to their servers.
Before you downvote, please entertain this one question: have you been able to predict that mandatory identification of online users under the guise of protecting children would literally be implemented in leading western countries in such a quick fashion? If you were, then upvote my comment instead because you know that will happen. If you couldn't even imagine this say in 2023 - then upvote my comment instead because neither you can imagine mandatory key extraction.
>A finger slip, a bug in a Windows update, or even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory, could all lead to the key being accidentally uploaded.
This is absurd, because it's basically a generic argument about any sort of feature that vaguely reduces privacy. Sorry guys, we can't have automated backups in windows (even opt in!), because if the feature exists, a random bitflip can cause everything to be uploaded to microsoft against the user's will.
There's a lot of sibling comments to mine here that are reading this literally, but instead, I would suggest the following reading: "I never selected that option!" "Huh, must have been a cosmic ray that uploaded your keys ;) Modern OS updates never obliterate user-chosen configurations"