Privacy

Microsoft 365, Artificial Intelligence, and Privacy

Last November, Microsoft experienced a great deal of criticism from privacy campaigners following the introduction of the Productivity Score feature. The resulting hubbub evolved into a PR issue which caused Microsoft to abandon display of individual user details, even if the data is easily available and widely used elsewhere inside Microsoft 365. In a nutshell,...

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Widespread Criticism of Microsoft Productivity Score is Unfounded

Intrusive Usage Data Exposed in Microsoft 365 Admin Center Over the past few week or so, a bunch of news reports have emerged about the new Microsoft 365 Productivity Score feature (Figure 1), which was announced at the Ignite 2019 conference before achieving general availability in October 2020. In the Microsoft blog, CVP Brad Anderson…

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Microsoft Under Pressure to Improve Teams Video to Stop Customers Going to Zoom

Although Teams has seen a spike in usage due to more people working at home, the view of participants in Teams video meetings is not as good as competitors such as Zoom. Basically, the 2 x 2 view used by Teams isn’t as visually attractive or useful as the gallery views supported by other video conferencing systems. Microsoft says they have elevated the priority of the work necessary to increase the number of participants in the meeting window. They don’t say when this will happen.

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Teams User Surveys Pose Privacy Concerns for Office 365 Tenants

According to Office 365 notification MC187538, Microsoft plans to start asking users to give feedback about Teams in pop-up surveys within the app to help Microsoft improve functionality. That all sounds OK until you consider that Microsoft will control the data it obtains from users and tenants will have no insight into what their users have told Microsoft. That’s not right.

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Office ProPlus Desktop Apps Get New Privacy Controls

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

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Microsoft Responds to Dutch DPIA with Privacy Control for Office ProPlus

Microsoft has announced that version 1904 of Office ProPlus (click to run) for Windows includes new privacy controls to allow organizations limit the data sent back by the Office apps. There’s no word about when they will deliver similar controls for Office for Mac, Office mobile, and the Office 365 server apps. Privacy is a real challenge in a world where cloud apps gather so much telemetry to measure performance, reliability, and other aspects, but it’s good that organizations will now be able to control how much they share with Microsoft.

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Using Discardable Office 365 Accounts to Preserve User Privacy

Delve is a great way to learn about important documents other Office 365 users are working on, but it can sometimes reveal something that it shouldn’t. Mostly this is the fault of the owners of SharePoint sites where documents are stored, but there are situations when people just don’t want Delve or other Graph-based applications revealing anything about their communications.

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View Diagnostic Data in Windows 10 April 2018 Update

In this Ask the Admin, I’ll show you the new Diagnostic Data Viewer in Windows 10.

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GDPR Is Here — What Does It Mean To You?

The General Data Protection Regulation applies to any business storing personal data on EU citizens.

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SharePoint Podcast Episode #323 — Brownies from California

Todd and Shane discuss SharePoint Online conditional access, PowerShell, Privacy Dashboard, an AI company, and trolling the patent filings.

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