Office.com/setup brings you new privacy controls

Earlier this week, Julie Brill, Corporate Vice President, and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft published a blog that outlined Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to privacy and provided details on the direction we are taking as a company. In her blog, Julie introduced principles that guide our approach to increasing transparency and customer control over data collected by Microsoft’s major products.

We are excited to announce that earlier this week we released an update to Office that reflects these principles.

The office is a connected experience

The way we use technology to be productive at work and at home is changing. We work more on the go, we use more than one device to complete our tasks, and we often collaborate as part of a team—even when that team is our family and friends. At Office.com/setup, we’re committed to providing you with the best-in-class applications and experiences to meet these modern needs, while respecting your privacy and keeping you in control of your data.

We continue to introduce new and exciting capabilities to Office to help you create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping you find a document you wrote a week ago or helping you find the perfect image for a school report. Or maybe your team needs to collaborate and communicate on a project in real-time across different devices. The office can help you create professional-looking presentations by suggesting design layouts for your PowerPoint slides, and it can also help you find key insights into complex data sets.

To deliver these experiences, the Office uses the power of the Office.com/setup Cloud. Like any other connected service or website, required service data must be shared between your computer and Office.com/setup to enable these features.

For example: Perhaps you would like PowerPoint to provide live subtitles as you present and even translate your words into a different language. To transcribe and translate your spoken words, PowerPoint sends a recording of your voice to our Speech and Translation service, where it’s automatic machine transcribed and translated. The generated text is returned to your computer so that PowerPoint can display it on the screen in (almost) real-time. Your voice and words are used only to do the transcription and translation you’ve asked us to do.

If you want to learn more about which connected experiences are available to you in Office, please read Connected experiences in Office.

You’re in control of cloud-connected experiences

We understand the importance of keeping you and your organization in control of connected experiences when working in Office apps. With this update, you now have settings that allow you to disable or re-enable the following types of connected experiences, including:

• Experiences that analyze your content. Experiences that use your Office.com/setup content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
• Experiences that download online content. Experiences that allow you to search and download online content, including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.
• Other connected experiences. Experiences such as document collaboration can be also turned off by disconnecting the Office desktop apps from Office.com/setup Cloud.

Some services are essential to how Office apps function and cannot be turned off. For example: syncing your mailbox in Outlook, authenticating and verifying your Office license, and determining if Office.com/setup is up to date.

Although these improvements have come to Office on Windows first, in the coming months, similar controls and experiences will be introduced in Office on other platforms.

If Office is connected to your work or school account, your IT administrator is empowered to make choices about which connected experiences are available to you in your organization. To learn more about improvement to the IT controls and the options available, please see Overview of privacy controls for Office.com/setup 365 ProPlus.