When Word asks to send your words to Microsoft – should you do it?
You may see a window like this pop up in Word.
Presumably these ‘help us’ windows appear for many languages supported by Microsoft directly.
What’s sent are single lines, out of their original context. Digits are replaced with zeros (see the ‘Larger drives….’ lines above).
Select a line and click ‘Delete Line’ if you want to remove it from the list sent to Microsoft.
Frankly, when we look through the lines that Microsoft wants, there are some we don’t recognize at all! Most likely they are text that’s been pasted into a Word document or Outlook email.
“Send Now” or “Don’t Send”?
It all depends on how much you trust Microsoft.
The company has a privacy policy against misuse of personal data but it’s possible that individual staff or groups might not have the same dedication to privacy when pressed to achieve corporate goals. It’s the difference between a company policy and the culture within the company.
We’d like to say you should choose ‘Send Now’ and contribute to making Word better, but past experience doesn’t give us a lot of confidence in how the data is used.
If your business has no relation to computers or software then Microsoft staff are unlikely to be interested. But anyone in the IT world should think twice about revealing anything to Microsoft.
See Also
- Microsoft Word and the Oxford comma
- Microsoft Word vs. Spelling Bee champions 2014
- Showing Language setting in Word
- Language and Dictionaries in MS Word
- Language support in Microsoft Office
- Office 2010 language packs
- Which languages in your copy of Office?
- Changing languages that come with Office
- Adding repeating words or phrases to the custom dictionary
- Persistent spell check missing an error
- Grammar in Word 2003
