this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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It's a rat race. You can only win by not playing.
But if you don’t play, your pay with convenience and your time. You lose the freedom of installing a lot of apps. You lose a lot :( - to the point where it would make most people give up
As of now, I find very few apps beneficial, convenient or time savers - maybe I'm a weirdo luddite. Most apps seem to be for pastimes anyway so saving time seems odd - I prefer to take time to savour my pastimes. I think mp3 player app, and organic maps are the real ones that I actually find useful.
But refusing GPS/microG and therefore Microsoft Authenticate will become a problem for me quite soon I think. For now a phonecall still works, but I think it's only a matter of time. Once that goes I might have to quit my job, and will struggle to find one in my field that doesn't require it, so I guess I'll have to look for less skilled work or retrain, and I'm far too old for that shit. That's where it'll get constraining, when the tentacles of bundling enwrap and bind many other aspects of real society.
I really hope the EU keeps on at MS for bundling and other market power abuse, it seems so obvious that they've effectively ignored the fines from the old Internet Exploder case, and ramped up their misbehaviour regardless.
Of course the twats where I live are easily radicalised against EU regulations (or any regulations really) , so I'm probably still fucked. But at least someone needs to stand up for consumer rights and competition and keep kicking MS in the balls every time they pull their dick out to fuck consumers. Ideally kick them harder and harder too, 'punitive damages' are more than justified due to them being a repeat offender.
Why Microsoft and not Google?
Idk what’s Microsoft Authenticator. Can’t use another 2FA app?
MS is who they choose - I think its all bundled in with windows and azure and dynamics and office and that stuff. I think MS is trying to use their B2B OS deals to get some market share from AWS, so they're probably offering cheap deals for now.
MS doesn't allow 3rd party 2FA. They created a proprietary algorithm so no other apps can do it.
For push-notification login, there is really no other choice beside the proprietary one.
But they do also provide universal TOTP for 2FA login, it does work with other apps too. (unless your org had set special 2FA rules) The alternative option is not so obvious on initial onboarding IIRC, though.