Windows 8.1: Can't Disable Encryption!

I have installed Windows 8.1 on my laptop, and I recently discovered that MS has enabled encryption by default for people who sign in with a MS account, without their knowledge or consent, in the name of supposedly protecting your data. This may seem to be a good thing for most people, but I find it to be a blatant violation of privacy, especially in an age where MS holds your recovery key and will turn over your info to the NSA/Prism/etc on the government's whims.

I plan to use another form of encryption called DiskCryptor, for which only I hold the key, and there are no known backdoors or security vulnerabilities. It would be a burden on my system to have 2 forms of encryption enabled at the same time, and so I wish to disable it.

I found this page (Windows 8.1 Will Start Encrypting Hard Drives By Default: Everything You Need to Know) and it details everything. But the instructions at the bottom of the page for disabling dont work, I followed everything to the tee and there is no such option.

At this point I'm seriously considering rolling back to Windows 8, or even 7.

I'm also starting this topic for the purpose of spurring a friendly discussion.

Thanks for any help!

As it says in the article you linked, device encryption cannot be turned off on devices running Windows RT, such as Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface 2.

However, as you're not using one of those devices, to start with are you sure it has actually automatically encrypted your drive, because it won't automatically encrypt the drive unless strict requirements are met? If you go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management does it say the drive is "(BitLocker Encrypted)"?

Also, if you go to Control Panel > Bitlocker Drive Encryption does it give you the option to turn off Bitlocker for your system drive?

Thanks for that, ARC1020, I read the article awhile back and simply assumed that 8.1 had automatically encrypted my system drive. But I did check Control Panel, it says there under BitLocker that C drive encryption is off, and Disk Management makes no mention of BitLocker like what is seen in your screenshot. Issue solved.....unless MS decides to enable it in the future without my knowledge. Now my only real concern is that MS might decide to force encryption in future versions of Windows with no option to disable it, in which case I'll be forced to turn to Linux and only use Windows for gaming.

I would, however, like to keep this topic open for discussion.