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Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising (www.techradar.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Windows 11 is getting out of hand with its push for advertisments, frankly - remember the recent full-screen pop-up to persuade users to install Edge or other Microsoft services? Then another advertisment was placed in the Start menu, and now Microsoft has finally worn my temper thin - with a new Game Pass ad coming to the Settings app.

This will likely arrive in the July update for Windows 11, or at least it’s almost certain to do so. It was present in the latest preview update Microsoft just released for the OS (and quickly paused due to a bug, but that’s another story). It’s also worth noting that the ad has been present in earlier test versions of Windows 11.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Exactly.

Fortunately, my company doesn't put ads in our product because it's essentially a B2B product and customers pay a lot to use it, and our product being unusable could cost individual customers potentially millions if it blocks their day-to-day activities (we deal with regulations). We do use spyware though (e.g. fullstory), which makes sense given that lens, since being able to solve problems before they report them has a lot of value for our customers. If we did anything unethical, I would push back and potentially quit, since I'm not interested at all in manipulating customers (ads, dark patterns, etc).

I don't think the tools we use to catch issues in the field make ethical sense in other contexts though. So yeah, I block a lot of the stuff we use in our product, and we don't do anything to actively counter blocking in our app either (if you block it, you don't get the pre-emptive bug-fixing).