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 service activity area. There, I could see the Microsoft services I’d used, including Microsoft Teams, plus Windows 10 apps like Adobe Photoshop 15, Windows Calculator, and Microsoft Photos. And it’s not just Store apps: Google Chrome was listed in there, though that’s about the extent of it. There’s no understanding of how much I used each app or service, for example. So it’s not clear what the “activity” is. Just that I’d launched or used each of the listed apps and services.

The Cortana’s Notebook page is a web-based version of the interface you can find in Windows 10, but I like that you can edit its contents from a central location. Again, I don’t use Cortana, but if I did, I’d spend time here going through each item and fine-tune my preferences and settings.

Finally, there’s the health activity area, and this is possibly the most useless part of this whole exercise: Like everyone else on earth, I use non-Microsoft products and services to track my activity and health data. Since I haven’t used a Microsoft offering to track this stuff in, what, over two years, there was no data to find. The whole thing feels vestigial.

Normally, I get my panties in a bunch when Microsoft is left out of discussions about tech industry trends, but in this case, it makes sense. Yes, Microsoft is collecting data about, most obviously in Windows 10, but also via its cloud services. But that data collection will be quite limited for most people, and is largely innocuous from what I can see. It’s worth looking at, but you’d be better off looking at what Google knows about you. And then maybe trying to limit that collection instead.

But if you are freaked out by what Microsoft is collecting, note that you can edit and/or delete all of it. I didn’t personally bother to do so.