They Are Lying

You read the bible, Microsoft?As you may recall Microsoft has gone big on selling its Office suite as a service with a monthly subscription fee.

Well, it appears that some people believe that the Redmond based software company will also use the cloud based system to train its AI models.

Microsoft has denied this, which (given the history of the company) is a pretty good indicator that this is what they are doing:

Microsoft's Connected Experiences option in its productivity suite has been causing consternation amid accusations that the default setting might allow Microsoft to train AI models using customers' Word and Excel documents and other data.

The Windows giant vehemently denies the claims. A spokesperson told The Register: "In Microsoft 365 consumer and commercial applications, Microsoft does not use customer data to train large language models without your permission."

We asked Microsoft what it meant by "permission" and if the permission was opt-in or opt-out, and the IT titan has yet to respond.

Connected Experiences has long been a part of Microsoft Office. Want to do some translation? You're probably using Connected Experiences. Transcribe a recording? Again, Connected Experiences. Do some grammar checking in Word? Connected Experiences will be analyzing your content.

The spokesperson said: "The Connected Services setting is an industry standard setting that enables features that require an internet connection. Connected experiences play a significant role in enhancing productivity by integrating your content with resources available on the web. These features allow applications to provide more intelligent and personalized services."

In recent weeks, users have been looking more deeply at what Microsoft is doing with all this data, and some have worried that it is being used to train the mega-corp's internal AI systems, something Microsoft says it is not.

………

The difficulty folks face is that despite Microsoft's protestations, its privacy statement (as of November 2024) does permit it to do all manner of things with the data it collects. And how does it use that data? "As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models."

In August, Microsoft said it would be using consumer data from Copilot, Bing, and Microsoft Start to train Copilot's generative AI models. At the time, the biz said it would allow customers to opt out and would start displaying the opt-out control in October. It also said it wouldn't be conducting training on consumer data from the European Economic Area.

Yep, no misuse of private data here.

They are lying through their teeth.

It's enough to get one to ask Microsoft if they know what Marcellus Wallace looks like.