Microsoft Word and Excel AI data scraping slyly switched to opt-in by default — the opt-out toggle is not that easy to find
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-word-and-excel-ai-data-scraping-slyly-switched-to-opt-in-by-default-the-opt-out-toggle-is-not-that-easy-to-findOpen linkView original on lemm.ee201
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This is illegal in Europe. I'm pretty sure EU countries are left out of this. This behavior is so blatantly criminal that one wonders why the EU are the only ones who have banned it.
Well I just checked my settings and it was enabled and I'm in the EU. Analytics was disabled but this special content scraper thingy was enabled.
Wow, if that's true, I hope the EU imposes significant fines, and not in two years...
Can confirm. These fuckers are gonna slapped with the mother of all fines
EU: best can do is 0.5% of global revenue
That’s not really what “opt-in” means.
For everyone who, like me, has to use MS for business reasons.
If you're in an organization, create a support ticket citing concerns about internal documents secrecy. They can disable it for everyone and tell Microsoft that they crossed the line.
How delightfully convoluted
Scraping Excel? What the hell are they going to do with that data, you can’t just make up quarterly reports.
Frankly, I wonder about that sometimes, given the reports I have seen from some CFOs
How else would you come up with your financial data?
I throw dice at monkeys then pray they don’t murder me in my sleep.
Sounds like as good a method as any.
It’s probably the structure of the documents that is most interesting for „AI“ when it comes to excel. Not the bare numbers, but what information goes where and how it gets linked.
The opt-out button is actually very easy to find. It's right there with the rest of the Uninstall buttons.
Great, nothing better than training LLMs on vulnerability assessment and Red Teaming reports of banks and clients. I hope this does have a GPO.
Not that it would help. Even though there is a chance the testers would turn it off (assuming they even know about it, I just learned about it today and already worked with two reports this week, just like dozen of my colleagues across several dozen projects) the report still goes through the hands of several management and even sales people on both sides. Unless both ITs has caught wind of it and have the GPO turned to opt out (which is unlikely), I'm honestly really looking forward to some training data in the form of highly confidential security data leaking.
It's not like businesses can just not use Excel or whatever. Microsoft has everyone by the balls and they know it.
Excel is a brilliant program, some may even call it excellent.
Businesses run on Excel. While it's feasible (if painful) to replace Word or PowerPoint, replacing Excel is just out of the question.
From what I hear from my brother working in a bank, they should be using databases and data querying instead of excel. What excessive excel use leads to, at least in such cases, is awful flimsy practices, certainty and stability.
The financial data and its accumulations run through multiple excel files referencing others. Traceability requirements that they have to guarantee by law are an issue; I wonder if they'll be able to implement them with Excel at all.
Businesses running on Excel is certainly factual. But I have to wonder whether it's necessary of even a good solution for their work.
If they're deep and wide into Excel, I imagine other data tooling would be better. And if they're not, other products like LibreOffice seem viable as direct replacements.
It's an absolute shit solution but it's being used very widely. And it has certainly led to plenty of fuck ups.
Every large company has sunk countless hours into training people, designing sheets, writing macros etc. Trying to move all that to a different product would be hugely painful and disruptive to everyday operations, because all of that would have to be redone and relearned. No company is going to do that.
Kind of correct but never say never. There should be a point upcoming where an explosive mixture of MS' software becoming too enshittified to make any more sense to use, and also too expensive to use (MS wants everyone to have a M365 subscription which they can then increase the prices for all the time), as well as competitor's growing stronger over the years as well, making them a more and more capable alternative, will result in MS Office losing market share and dominance. Windows is also already on a slow decline, it had around ~90% market share during the Win7 era and since then it's sliding downhill, at about ~70% right now. Sure it takes many years, decades even, but it's bound to happen with MS' current course of action as well as the competition growing better as well.
Many of my macros / vba code can't run on LibreOffice.
Because they're done with specific ms-office macros or because libre-office has no equivalents?
It may not be an immediate 1 to 1 switch with extensive or specific macros, but I would imagine it would be possible and no worse after migration?
well, i switched to libreoffice on my laptop 2 weeks ago. Switching to linux entirely when i get the desktop. Garuda or Bazzite. Maybe Tumbleweed