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Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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The workarounds people come up with to not make an MS account seem crazy to me. What difference does it really make if its a local account or not? You are still using windows so clearly you are ok with everything else, but the account is too much?
Well, at least in 10, the username is something dumb and you can't change it during creation (or everywhere easily after creation) when doing an online account. But linking after you create your account let you set it to whatever. So there may be people who are fine with online accounts but just want to set their usernames to whatever.
Using a Microsoft cloud account to log into my local computer means Microsoft owns credentials to a device in my house, and if they get hacked (which they do, all the fucking time), my device is less secure because of it and my data is less secure because of it.
There's absolutely no need for my copy of Windows to require me to login using a cloud-based account.
You can use all manner of apps to disable the telemetry and privacy nonsense that people have issues with Windows about (and I similarly find Microsoft's privacy-last approach to be tedious), but if your computer requires you to use a cloud account to log in, then your computer is susceptible to that cloud account being hijacked or hacked and Microsoft has given absolutely no good reason for this to be the case.
Logging in to a Microsoft account doesn't provide any real benefit to the user at all, the best you can say is that you're not prompted to log in again if you run the Microsoft Store or the Xbox app, and that's not a compelling benefit.