PSA: Microsoft may be training on your private data without your knowledge

The Great Data Heist continues.

This just in: Microsoft is apparently, at least for some Office subscribers, maybe most, scraping private documents.

A colleague just alerted me to this impotant post on LinkedIn:

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I don’t know what fraction of subscribers are affected. In my own case, I see that this setting was on – surely not by deliberate choice:

I switched it off (a restart is required after that).

If you have anything at all private or sensitive in Office documents, you might want to do the same. [For the US MS Office products: <Application Name> (top menu bar) => Settings... => Privacy => unselect "Turn on optional connected experiences".]

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This sort of tactic isn’t even new. LinkedIn pulled a similar stunt in September.

Every big tech company is desperate for training data, and we can expect more companies following the same sly opt-out playbook, hiding what is going in obscure settings and Terms of Service nobody reads.

Be on your guard; it’s going to happen a lot.

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Speaking of which, moments ago a close friend just sent me this:

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The key point of my recent book Taming Silicon Valley is directly relevant here: none of us stand any chance against big tech unless we stand together.

If we don’t, they will walk all over all of us.

Dr. Gary Marcus love the scientific question of how we might develop machines that are intelligent, but despises the way that the AI industry is ripping off everyday people.