There are the beginning of rumblings that Microsoft is reading all of our stuff in Microsoft office for the purpose of AI training.

Just to try to get ahead of things:
The setting, first called "Let Office connect to online services from Microsoft to provide functionality that's relevant to your usage and preferences.", backed by the registry value ControllerConnectedServicesSourceLocation, is as old as the release of Office 2016 in the year 2015. I didn't bother checking anything older.

About 5 years ago, this preference was renamed to "Enable optional connected experiences. (But is still backed by the ControllerConnectedServicesSourceLocation registry value).

Now, somebody just noticed this 5-year-old preference and wrote a Medium article about it, saying that Microsoft is reading all of your documents if it's left enabled.

I cannot definitively state that Microsoft is not training AI on your Office documents. But this preference is NOTHING NEW. If you wish to claim that Microsoft is shoveling out your documents for the sake of AI, you will need to BACK IT UP WITH EVIDENCE. No, pointing to a Medium article written by some random person does not count.

@wdormann Is this the feature implemented by ai.exe, aka. "Artificial Intelligence Host"? That thing caused problems for me before by trying to chat with the mothership:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ylkip5/comment/j3vjm8w/

@wdormann thank you, this is the kind of critical thinking (or is it common sense?) there seems to be lack of on the other social media website.

@wietze
Yeah, it's completely blowing up on the other site.
But as we've realized, critical thinking isn't too popular over there. 😂

@wdormann a colleague pointed to this Wavestone analysis this morning (excuse me for my french): https://nuage.herbinet.fr/index.php/s/t8KWZ3ZAcDcLeS5

@w00p
Thanks. This is exactly the sort of information I've been looking for.

However, I've been unable to reproduce their findings. At least not with a "normal" Office 365 installation. Not sure if Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise is somehow different. 🤔

@wdormann I don't know if there's a difference with Enterprise.

@w00p
Eh, I tried an exact same version as reported (2308 - Build 16731.20550), and the "Apps for enterprise" version of Office at that, and I still cannot confirm their findings.

@wdormann Hello Will,
Cool you tried to reproduce it!
Unfortunately, in the report there are no information about the machine they used for the analysis, so it's difficult to find out if a local setting is different.
We didn't try to reproduce it.

@w00p
Yeah, I have to imagine that some user-triggered action that perhaps (hopefully?) is obvious to the user that it'd involve sending the document contents to Microsoft is required.

If so, that's a pretty significant part to leave off of a report.

Otherwise, this sounds like quite the violation of privacy.

@w00p
Also, FWIW: