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Isn't this practice against some of the antithrust laws? How is it "enough" different from what Microsoft had been doing?
I have just got an old iPhone from a relative for my convenience, and blown away. This is not a new thing. Google, somehow, have been getting away with this practice for many years now. To me it seems as extremely foul, and I just cannot understand, how?
1. View registered devices to the Microsoft account (https://account.microsoft.com/devices), 5%
2. View device page for laptop, 5%
3. View Find My Device tab on laptop's device page, 5%
4. Get the device locked via Lock button modal window, 0%
I'm not asking for a miracle. It's a feature available for devices registered to Microsoft account. It's a emergency security feature, and it doesn't work right now. I'm disappointed to say the least. The idea is cool, the feature would be useful. Just because the interface is horribly crippled, unusable, dysfunctional, it is all a junk, rubbish, a joke.
The error I get for the 95% of the time failures for the 1, 2 and 3 is: "Try refreshing the page, something's wrong on our side." You really can reach to the page just by refreshing, around 20 times. It is completely stupid how being stubborn helps resolving this.
The error I get all the time for the 4th step is: "Try again later, cannot reach your device right now", as far as I remember, because I couldn't reach the page for over 30 minutes trying. It is unbelievable, incredible, bizarre how Microsoft does not repeat the lockdown request by itself until they manage to reach to the device, expecting me to try it day and night, getting so lucky to hit the probably-narrow timespan where they will try and power-up and connect the device to the internet.
All the other Microsoft account pages I have tried work just fine. Only this critically important emergency feature page works like the cheap web pages from 1999 on a dial-up modem.
All I can say is, forget about the Find My Device feature offered by Microsoft, as if it has never existed. It is a true false-sense-of-security feature, void, worse than nothing.
I am not given any other options than to Contact Support about it, which I did yesterday and got an answer today that tells me nothing more than the very few that I know:
> Microsoft disabled access to the account due to a serious violation of the Microsoft Services Agreement https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement. As stated in the Microsoft Services Agreement, you will no longer be able to access any Services that require Microsoft account. For any subscriptions associated with the account, Microsoft will immediately cease charging the credit card on file for recurring charges. [...] Pursuant to our terms, we cannot reactivate your account, nor provide details as to why it was closed. This represents Microsoft’s final communication regarding this account.
I hope that I am not violating any other terms by sharing these messages. I do it out of frustration to know what exactly I might have done to deserve this, something more detailed than "you have violated our Terms as you eat your dinner", because without knowing which action of mine caused this, I either;
a) Will be unable to understand my mistake and not repeat it,
b) Will fear out of doing nearly everything and refrain from them, such as using a VPN on Amazon's AWS at Ohio, which I am sincerely suspicious of.
Microsoft's own way of justice is against the legal systems in all the modern countries, which always makes sure that the accused knows their faults, as one of their rights, and for the benefit of the accused not getting involved in such acts for a second time, for that they this time will know.