Social media is spreading a false ‘tip’ that’s supposed to stop Microsoft spying on your work in Word and Excel. The suggestion might not work at all and worse, it’ll stop important Office features from working at all. And Microsoft is NOT spying on Word, Excel or PowerPoint for their AI.
The ‘tip’ is supposed to “turn off AI-scraping from your Word documents” because supposedly Microsoft “in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems”. It then gives instructions to turn off this spying.
Here’s one example of the genre
So many problems with this, it’s hard to know where to begin. We’ll look at the practical problems with this simplistic and overreaching tip then the broader issue of Microsoft’s content scraping on our use of Office (hint: it’s not).
Sidebar: Social media is a bad place for tech advice. So much of it is either wrong, incomplete, misleading, clickbait or attention seeking. That applies especially to the ‘short form’ platforms like Twitter/X, Threads, BlueSky etc.
The ‘fix’ that makes things worse
The suggested fix isn’t based on facts, probably doesn’t work and will disable features you’ll probably need in Microsoft 365/Office.
The advice goes like this (there are various versions being spread around social media). Keep in mind that the option is NOT new and certainly has NOT been ‘slyly turned on’.
“File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: ‘Turn on optional connected experiences’”
Presumably it means this option “All Connected Experiences” which will turn off over 50 features in Microsoft Office!
Admittedly, some of these are obscure or only apply in organizations but others like Dictation, Read Aloud and Translator are features people rely on.
The tip doesn’t mention the two options above the ‘All connected experiences’ choice which gives you some choice by putting the online features into two groups.
- Analyze content
- Download content
“Experiences that analyze your content”
The “Experiences that analyze your content” mean some of a user’s content is sent to Microsoft’s servers before some response appears in Office. For example, with Dictation your spoken words go to Microsoft and come back as text. That data could be used by Microsoft to train their AI systems.
There’s NO guarantee that turning this option OFF will disable any content snooping that Microsoft is doing … assuming they are at all. But it definitely will block access to many useful features.
Turning off this option also disables Copilot AI inside Office (e.g. paid Copilot) even though it’s not listed by Microsoft. Copilot outside Office (web site, Windows apps etc) aren’t affected.
“Experiences that download content”
The ‘download content’ features are less intrusive but even those involve sending a request to Microsoft. For example, choosing an icon or other stock media means telling Microsoft which item you want so their system can send it to you.
Microsoft should provide more options to select which online features to make available instead of just two broad options but they’ve consistently resisted doing that.
Is Microsoft spying on its customers?
Microsoft is certainly using customer activity to train its AI services. All the major AI services, Google, Meta, Twitter/X etc are all grabbing as much data as they can to feed their AI monsters.
But Microsoft has NOT recently or ever “ slyly turned on an ‘opt-out’ feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems”.
The ‘Connected Service’ options we’ve mentioned above have been in Office since at least 2019 when the label was introduced (we wrote about the name change at the time). Some of the online features existed well before that.
Copilot activity is certainly used to train the AI system. But that does NOT apply to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook – either free or paid Copilot plans.
Is Microsoft using anything done in Word or Excel to train their AI system?
There’s NO evidence to support that, only suspicion, rumor and ‘clickbait social media posts. Microsoft’s public statements are clear that Office documents are not used to train their AI.
To sum up …
You can turn off one or both of the Connected Experience options in modern Office but there’s a high price to pay in lost features.
It’s a trade off between getting features that make your work easier and faster versus possible privacy loss.
It doesn’t matter if you turn the Connected Services off or not because Microsoft is NOT using Office documents to train their AI.
