On Windows 11 when you sign in with a Microsoft account and the device fully supports bitlocker, it starts encrypting the drive without any user consent or acknowledgement. It did so on my laptop
Only with a local account you’re prompted to save a backup somewhere else, and it’s picky, doesn’t let you save it on the drive that’s going to be encrypted
Idk man… maybe is a recent change or something but on my three devices I installed Win 11, I activated Bitlocker after a while, it was not activated on my install/login. So my experience is completely different it didn’t start encrypting without consent.
And to be clear I have used Microsoft accounts on all of them.
On my Lenovo laptop my drive was encrypted without my consent, I was very pissed (due to a bug that wiped the tpm during a firmware update, I had 20 minutes of panic because I had no idea what was the bitlocker decryption key)
It seems to be a behaviour particular to portable devices. I’d argue encryption by default is a good thing on a device that’s more likely to be stolen (and the identity theft implications that brings) but clearly it needs to be better communicated to the end user.
I reinstalled windows 11 recently and had to manually re-encrypt the boot drive, which also prompted me to save a copy of the key. I had the option of backing up to my MS account, saving a txt file (which it refuses to let you place on any encrypted drive, even if it’s a different one to the one you’re encrypting at the time), or print it (which can be to a PDF you can save anywhere).
It’s possible to access the backup options at any time after that as well.
I usually take the last option, save the pdf to the same drive then copy paste the key into my password manager then delete the file.
On Windows 11 when you sign in with a Microsoft account and the device fully supports bitlocker, it starts encrypting the drive without any user consent or acknowledgement. It did so on my laptop
Only with a local account you’re prompted to save a backup somewhere else, and it’s picky, doesn’t let you save it on the drive that’s going to be encrypted
Idk man… maybe is a recent change or something but on my three devices I installed Win 11, I activated Bitlocker after a while, it was not activated on my install/login. So my experience is completely different it didn’t start encrypting without consent. And to be clear I have used Microsoft accounts on all of them.
On my Lenovo laptop my drive was encrypted without my consent, I was very pissed (due to a bug that wiped the tpm during a firmware update, I had 20 minutes of panic because I had no idea what was the bitlocker decryption key)
It seems to be a behaviour particular to portable devices. I’d argue encryption by default is a good thing on a device that’s more likely to be stolen (and the identity theft implications that brings) but clearly it needs to be better communicated to the end user.
I reinstalled windows 11 recently and had to manually re-encrypt the boot drive, which also prompted me to save a copy of the key. I had the option of backing up to my MS account, saving a txt file (which it refuses to let you place on any encrypted drive, even if it’s a different one to the one you’re encrypting at the time), or print it (which can be to a PDF you can save anywhere). It’s possible to access the backup options at any time after that as well. I usually take the last option, save the pdf to the same drive then copy paste the key into my password manager then delete the file.