Windows AI spying on you?

[Uncle Gizmo]

I spotted this on Xwitter. I have not verified it with Grok yet!

It appears that Microsoft have a feature that allows them to search through your documents which has been introduced sneakily!

You have to turn it off!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1860530950041485565

I think it'll get verified in this thread!

 

[Gasman]

I have just unticked all those options.
Thank you Tony.

 

[GPGeorge]

Outlook informed me that I had to restart Office after opting out in Word. Access notified me that the Privacy Settings were changed. Apparently it goes across all Office apps, not just Word and Excel. If you use Office, it applies.

It's not that I write a lot of sensitive personal data in Word; it's the idea that MS could hoover up all of that written material without notification.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

On Win11, under Settings >> Privacy & Security >> Diagnostics & Feedback, you can find a few of those settings. I turned them off long ago, along with turning off CoPilot's options. But then again, not all systems are "co-pilot ready" and mine didn't have the settings enabled by default.

I found that even with the other general settings, the option you mentioned was still enabled. But it isn't now. Fortunately, ALL of Office uses the same Trust Center settings. Even though the dialog boxes look different, once you uncheck that option in Trust Center for Word, all of the other items that use trust center show the same setting.

 

[AccessBlaster]

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft "re-enables" these settings through cumulative updates, feature updates, monthly rollup updates, etc.

 

[Gasman]

Update:
I unticked those options, but now I find I cannot access my stock data anymore. Had to switch them back on to be able to do so.
Any idea if I can switch them on and off with VBA.

Edit: Further posts on that thread state it is a load of bo**cks.?

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Edit: Further posts on that thread state it is a load of bo**cks.?

Shall I ask ChatGPT?

 

[Gasman]

Shall I ask ChatGPT?

Well whether it is or not, if you want to access any online url, for downloading some data, for my purposes at least, , it has to be enabled.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In my case, one of the privacy settings at the main Yahoo site controls whether you can see videos in news articles if they contract out their video to third-party servers. If you tell them "don't sell my information" then you don't get to see embedded videos from third party providers.