Mandatory Survey Prompt Launched by Microsoft When Exiting OneDrive

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• Statement from Microsoft

Microsoft’s clingy behavior continues to annoy Windows users. Last month, the company introduced an optional pop-up survey that’s triggered when installing Chrome from Edge. Now, Windows users are being hit with a mandatory survey when they try to close OneDrive.

UPDATE: 2023/11/10 10:11 EST BY ANDREW HEINZMAN

Statement from Microsoft

In a statement to The Verge , Microsoft explains that “a small subset of consumer OneDrive users” were shown the OneDrive survey between the dates of November 1st and November 8th. The survey is, presumably, done.

The survey pop-up, which was first noticed by Neowin , warns that data cannot be synced to the cloud when OneDrive is closed. On its own, this warning may be useful to some people, as Microsoft doesn’t provide a clear-cut “quit” button for the OneDrive application. To close OneDrive, you need to right-click the OneDrive icon in your system tray, click the settings cog that shows up in the OneDrive panel, and select “pause syncing.” You can also kill OneDrive in the Task Manager, but in any case, it’s hard to tell when you’re actually quitting the application.

Neowin

A warning is fine, and this particular warning has been around for a while. But the new survey dropdown forces users to “select a reason for quitting OneDrive.” Here are the answers you’re allowed to choose from:

• I don’t want OneDrive running all the time
• I don’t know what OneDrive is
• I don’t use OneDrive
• I’m trying to fix a problem with OneDrive
• I’m trying to speed up my computer
• I get too many notifications
• Other

Honestly, OneDrive is a pretty solid cloud storage solution, especially for those who regularly use Teams, Word, and other Microsoft applications. The problem is that all Windows users are forced to interact with OneDrive—it opens automatically during startup, it’s hard to close, and it has this new mandatory survey. If you uninstall OneDrive, it may be reinstalled during a future Windows update. And if that’s not enough, Windows 11 will show you ads for OneDrive . By the way, you can change OneDrive’s startup behavior in the Task Manager.

The new survey appears in OneDrive version 23.214.1015.0001, per Neowin. We had trouble replicating the survey on our Windows PCs, which may indicate it’s part of a rollout that isn’t complete.

Source: Neowin

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