Copilot and privacy…topic du jour
I know this might be beating a dead horse for some. But I think it’s important to keep privacy at the forefront when it comes to the big tech companies and the devices that we use.
I’m part of a Copilot pilot program, yes that’s the actual name, for the company that I work for. And the things that it can do are pretty amazing. I really like the prompt UI in Word and PowerPoint using the / to pull up documents to have it use, that’s really neat. And you can have it use more than one document and compare them for you. It can’t do this with Excel files but they said Microsoft is working on that. And it can analyze PDF files but that’s also in the works. I really love how it can summarize the past few days of a Teams chat. That’s going to be super helpful when coming back from a long weekend, or vacation, or if I don’t want to read an entire chat to see what everyone was talking about.
One feature I’ve been using daily is a task summary in Teams. It’ll tell you what you should be focusing on, working on, however, you’d like to say it. I find this helpful because I easily can have days where I’m drilling done on a project and completely forget about a simple email reply I could’ve done, upcoming meetings to prepare for, or replying to a Teams chat, really neat!
So now the privacy concerns. I don’t know how this will work on a personal computer but in an enterprise environment, Copilot automatically has access to everything in your OneDrive and all the Sharepoint folders you have access to. This makes sense and logical since it needs to have access to them to help you with all its capabilities, fine understood. But what concerns me is that some clever hacker could or human error would give malicious access to all your OneDrive and Sharepoint files.
And about that human error part. How many times have we seen in the past where Windows had errors that led to privacy issues for the user? Or Windows had errors that led to features breaking. Now that Copilot/Microsoft has access to personal files in a tangible way…that just makes me uncomfortable.
So I use Windows for work. And I’m very nerdy and strict about not doing anything personally on my work laptop because one, I should be working on my work laptop not doing personal stuff. And two, even before all this AI hoopla it’s always been known that a company’s IT department could have access to everything on your work computer.
I’ve been using MacOS in my personal life since 2020. My concern now is that Apple is going to do the proverbial “that tech company is doing it so now we have to†the keeping up with the tech Jones if you will. They all do this. Personally, I don’t want a Recall type feature built into MacOS. But I’m not naive I know Apple and Microsoft if they wanted to could look right into my computer and see everything I’m doing. But if they did such a blatant thing, well that would be a major issue and PR nightmare for them.
I’m no Luddite when it comes to AI. I use ChatGPT all the time to help summarize articles and do research on topics that I find interesting. It’s a time saver and super helpful. I just wonder if in trying to capture the AI market, which they have every right to do and should because they’re tech companies, I wonder if they’re sincerely considering the if they should question.
And a side note here. I really don’t like the pushback you sometimes get when voicing privacy concerns. I fully understand that if some government clandestine agency wants to spy on you there’s nothing you can do to avoid that. Unless you’ve been off the grid since before the internet, don’t have a social, don’t have a bank account, don’t have a mortgage or pay rent, don’t pay a utility company, don’t have a driver’s license, didn’t attend school, etc., But what’s real and happens pretty much daily are database hacks and leaks. And tech companies selling your data to marketing companies…and those companies being a victim of a hack or leak. Now screenshots of what you did on your computer and your physical files could become part of this. That’s what is mostly my privacy concern. OK, curmudgeon rant over ?.
