I really doubt those motives are "evil." They're in the business of selling and supporting an OS. Most people couldn't safeguard a 10-byte password on their own, they're not going to have a solution for saving their encryption key that keeps it safer than it'd be with Microsoft, and that goes for both criminals (or people otherwise facing law enforcement scrutiny) and normal grandmas who just want to not have all their pictures and recipes lost.

Before recently, normal people who get arrested and have their computer seized were 100% guaranteed that the cops could read their hard drive and society didn't fall apart. Today, the chances the cops can figure out how to read a given hard drive is probably a bit less. If someone needs better security against the actual government (and I'm hoping that person is a super cool brave journalist and not a terrorist), they should be handling their own encryption at the application layer and keeping their keys safe on their own, and probably using Linux.

The OOBE (out of box experience) uploads the key by default (it tells you it’s doing it, but it’s a bit challenging to figure out how to avoid it) but any other setup method specifically asks where to back up your key, and you can choose not to. The way to avoid enrollment is to enable Bitlocker later than OOBE.

I really think that enabling BitLocker with an escrowed key during OOBE is the right choice, the protection to risk balance for a “normal” user is good. Power users who are worried about government compulsion can still set up their system to be more hardened.

You can just ... not select the option to upload your keys to MS? During the setup you get to choose where to store your bitlocker recovery key.

It's a few clicks to choose to re-key and not have the key saved to your Microsoft account.

Maybe three letter agencies prevented them from giving that option.

> tradeoff between security and convenience they'd certainly have far fewer customers

What? Most people, thinking through the tradeoff, would 100% not choose to be in charge of safeguarding their own key, because they're more worried about losing everything on their PC, than they are about going to jail. Because most people aren't planning on doing crime. Yes, I know people can be wrongly accused and stuff, but overall most people aren't thinking of that as their main worry.

>Phones have had FDE enabled by default for years. Nobody needs backup keys for those.

Yes, phones just try to back up all of your data online.

Always on FDE with online backups is a perfectly reasonable default. The OOBE does offer the users the choice to not back up their key online, even if it's displayed less prominently.

>By giving the user the three options with consequences you empower the user to address their threat model how they see fit.

Making it too easy for uneducated users to make poor choices is terrible software design.

> it may as well be.

That defies the definition of "forced". Forced means no option. You can disagree all you want -- but at a technical level, you're incorrect.