> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.

That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

Yeah QA is basically nonexistent at Microsoft, at least it hasn't been since the early Windows 10 days. At work we ended up getting rid of all of our Windows runners because we found out that running our tools on WINE got objectively more reliable and deterministic than having to deal with Microsoft's bullcrap

If windows borks itself how many people will just give up and buy a new computer? That's Microsoft's entire game right now with obsoleting perfectly good hardware.

But yes, this one is most likely just plain incompetence

No, but re-enabling OneDrive might qualify.

Sometimes it's a fairly fine difference between dark and merely dim.

You have to explicitly add a Microsoft account and enable the photo synchronization on Samsung phone. It's not enabled by default.

Also by default OneDrive uses the cloud files where it downloads none of the files unless you specifically ask to do it.

>Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

It gets your data.