The US Government has quickly realized the utility of monopolies and no longer goes after them.

In the year of 2026, the rule of thumb is if you can get your work done without touching windows, then you should. It goes without saying you should never trust any third party let alone a big corp.

I fully agree that this is disconcerting form a privacy standpoint, and the danger it poses when Microsoft gets hacked.

As for it being user hostile. I am pretty certain that thousands of users a year are delighted when something has gone wrong and they can recover their keys and data from the MS Cloud.

There should perhaps be a screen in a wizard, Do you want your data encrypted? y,n

If (yes) Do you want to be able to recover your data if something bad happens? (else it will be gone for ever, you can never ever access it again) y/n

I summarized all comments and overall discussion using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/bitlocker-fbi-keys-privacy/

You should carry around a Ventoy stick with Debian/XFCE and perhaps Mint on it, and a 16 TB external disk, and nag people in your local environment to let you back up their stuff and move them off MICROS~1 operating systems.

Tell them you work in IT and that you'll make their computer faster and more secure. Don't mention Linux by name.

So theoretically if you loose the key , you can selfreport for some small crime and get your laptop decrypted.

This happens with every company that has your sensitive info. When the government asks for your info, the companies provide it.

Some ways around this is to either not store sensitive user data on servers, or if that needs to happen then encrypt it with user supplied keys.

Being on windows 10 really is a simple life, no windows updates, no win defender malware givng the ok on my files, no microsoft telemetry anymore, cortanas been gone since day one. Then there's win11 users getting abused on the daily.

The problems of centralization. Some economic sectors are centralized by nature, IT is not.

This is no different to Apple placing the encryption key for Filevault as plaintext on disk when it is turned off. Both companies make it easy for you to recover data in event of a catastrophe.