What Does Microsoft Know About Us? Not Much (Premium)

Most of the privacy reporting these days is focused on Google and Facebook, and rightly so: These firms maximize their earnings by knowing more about you.

But what about Microsoft? What does the software giant know about its users?

To find out, I did what everyone is doing with Google and Facebook, but with Microsoft: I located its personal data download tool and downloaded my own history, as understood by Microsoft.

To do so yourself, open the Microsoft account website, sign-in, and then navigate to Privacy. Here, you will find a dashboard that list the various top-level items that Microsoft tracks: Your browsing history, search history, location activity, voice activity, content consumption, product and service activity, product and service performance (really, reliability), Cortana's Notebook (the opt-in list of information you provided to the service so it can make your life better), and health activity.

That seems like a lot of data. And I suppose it will be for the pro-Microsoft set whose lives still revolve completely around Redmond. But in this mobile-first, cloud first-age, most people will have likely given Microsoft very little important data to work with in recent years. After all, most people only interact with Microsoft when they're working.

So what does my dashboard show me?

As was the case with Facebook, which I found to be more interesting than controversial, my peek at Microsoft's understanding of me was mostly uneventful.

My browsing history is a study in bland, since I don't use Microsoft Edge regularly, like most people. I apparently visited Bing and MSN on April 17---I don't actually use either, ever---and sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook over time.

My search history was a combination of the obvious and the weird. In the latter category were two searches, "How abundant is Rhenium?" and "How abundant is Gallium?" that I don't recall making. A search about Peter Mayhew of Star Wars fame. And something about VMWare. But I use Google almost all of the time for searches, of course. Like everyone else. So the quality of this data is pretty limited.

Microsoft's understanding of my location is accurate (both the exact address and map location), and that makes sense: I do very occasionally use the Windows 10 Weather app, and I let it know my precise location.

My voice activity is almost non-existent. This again makes sense because I use Google Assistant and various Google Home devices for this purpose. I apparently asked Cortana some basic questions---"What time is it?", "What's the weather going to be like this weekend?", and "How many cups are in a quart?"---in early March. Possibly because I was writing something about Cortana. I would normally never use Cortana.

The content consumption category is likewise effectively worthless: I don't use Microsoft's Movies & TV app unless I am testing PC battery life. So that's the data that is there.

Then I examined the product and ser...