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Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

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Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#181

Post by hutzlibu »

proee wrote: post #140
exceptione wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, You cannot trust an OS you cannot build yourself. That's why I see Linux as the only option for professionals and privacy minded people.

How do you know there are no outside efforts to log linux activities? There's a lot of source code to go through and is it possible there are callbacks even within OSS that most people are not aware of?

It all depends of course on the level of your paranoia/threat model.

To prevent standard data leaking or rather stealing like in this case, linux is a quite solid choice.

But if you think you are a high profile target, you should probably learn how to deactivate Intels ME and co.

And if you are really paranoid, you should assume that there are hardware backdoors. But what do you do then? Build your computer from scratch?

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#182

Post by galleywest200 »

itsmillertime4u wrote: post #163
jimnotgym wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they run on the same infrastructure as the rest of us?

No they run in isolated networks. No classified DoD networks have any access to the internet.

I think the user met the same networks on Microsoft's end.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#183

Post by jeroenhd »

Like I said last time:

> Did we consent to this?

Yes, unless Microsoft doesn't ask for consent in whatever country the author is from. There's a consent popup that you need to click through that informs you that the content of your slides are shared with Microsoft. This is part of "intelligent services" in case you're looking for the details.

The author should be able to turn this feature off easily, but yes, they did consent to this. They just might have done so months ago and forgotten about it.

Find out more about the "intelligent services" that also send the contents of your document to the cloud if you click on their respective buttons here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/conne...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#184

Post by nvr219 »

nbzso wrote: post #123
user3939382 wrote: post #64

What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, including all native ones, including UI apps, are blocked from network connectivity by default, and the user gets an easy monitor of outgoing traffic with TLS/SSL inspection built in (you'd need some OS API to enable that). Kind of like granular oauth permissions, apps should have to declare which outgoing they have, a description/why, an…

Since 2014 I don't trust my macs. There is no Apple computer without LS installed on in my company. Actually, if LS is not available, I will not use Apple computers at all. Period.

What happened in 2014?

Also someone told me here that LS should be considered harmful.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#185

Post by treesknees »

I can't say whether the blog is correct or not, as I haven't seen the actual network traffic, but there are privacy controls that the author probably hasn't configured [1]. If it was configured correctly, Designer wouldn't even be available. So it's not as though every user of PowerPoint will have their data collected by Microsoft.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/manag...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#186

Post by moffkalast »

dustedcodes wrote: post #145

Microsoft and Google have OneDrive and Google Drive where most slide decks are stored anyway so in some ways this is barely newsworthy, on the other hand I guess if someone purposefully selected Office instead of Google slides for their presentations and thought using an offline app which doesn't save the files to their OneDrive would keep them secret might get surprised by this feature.

Well with Google Slides you know they'll be storing your data quite obviously right off the bat. The problem isn't so much the storing as the lying.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#187

Post by squarefoot »

user3939382 wrote: post #64

What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, including all native ones, including UI apps, are blocked from network connectivity by default, and the user gets an easy monitor of outgoing traffic with TLS/SSL inspection built in (you'd need some OS API to enable that). Kind of like granular oauth permissions, apps should have to declare which outgoing they have, a description/why, an…

On Linux there is OpenSnitch that does its job nicely, although I experienced some occasional desktop slowdowns even after training it to open everything for trusted programs.

https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch

I still recall the old days of Windows when I tried Kerio Personal Firewall and realized how much software already phoned home two decades ago. That was the last wake up call that pushed me into getting rid of closed source software, possibly also hardware, especially when they connect to the internet.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#188

Post by rhaway84773 »

proee wrote: post #140
exceptione wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, You cannot trust an OS you cannot build yourself. That's why I see Linux as the only option for professionals and privacy minded people.

How do you know there are no outside efforts to log linux activities? There's a lot of source code to go through and is it possible there are callbacks even within OSS that most people are not aware of?

I don’t need to go through all the source code myself. The fact that Apple itself, for example, relies on Linux for most of its servers and has not raised any alarms about bits of Linux phoning home is a pretty powerful heuristic that it’s relatively safe.

Multiply that by all the multibillion dollar other companies, the tens of thousand open source focused smaller and large companies, the hobbyists, the enthusiasts, the CS professors, the CS undergrad and grad students, the PHD candidates who would be thrilled to discover a flaw on the basis of which they could write their thesis, etc. and I think one can have a fair degree of confidence.

There’s still a decent chance something would be missed. But it’s much smaller than the chance that the proprietary OS owners, whom we know for a fact phone home and have been trying to collect increasing amounts of data, are sending stuff we may not know about.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#189

Post by danuker »

Waterluvian wrote: post #55

Obtaining user data should be a horrifying prospect for companies. They should obsessively work for alternative ways to not need it for their goals. And when they need it, to be ridiculously careful about it. (you could substitute "user data" for "application state" here) But it's not because there aren't sufficient consequences. Memory leaks don't properly crash the company as they should.

> Memory leaks

I suspect you mean data leaks, in the context of your comment. But memory leaks should be a thing of the past also - they hint at the quality of the underlying code.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#190

Post by jeroenhd »

Someone1234 wrote: post #23

This is a one paragraph claim that doesn't provide resources to show that their claim has basis. It could very well be entirely accurate, but there's no information contained here to know one way or the other. For example there have been numerous claims made previously that link ANY network traffic to a supposed invasion of privacy, but once you delve into the underlying traffic it isn't nearly as nefarious as it ini…

Powerpoint indicates that message content is being used for design proposals in the consent prompt.

The Microsoft website says it "analyses your data": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/conne...

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