Microsoft Is Spying On You!

Microsoft's 365 Office Suite was recently banned in Germany over privacy concerns. Should you be using a more private office suite instead?

Microsoft Office is one of the most used suites of programs worldwide. They have become so common that their programs have worked their way into our daily vocabulary, and they set the standards for document formats.

It turns out that they collect a lot of data from their users, both when used online via their collaborative tooling, and "offline" with their downloaded software. Microsoft is also very closed lipped about the details of their data collection.

We dive into a report that recently came out of Germany looking at the privacy of Microsoft. We also look at a privacy-focused office suite alternative, LibreOffice, and how it compares.

00:00 Intro
00:42 What is Microsoft’s Office Suite?
01:37 Online vs Offline Products
03:08 Connected Experiences
04:27 Microsoft’s Data Collection Practices
07:20 Telemetry and Diagnostic Events Explained
08:52 Types of Diagnostic Data Microsoft Collects
10:05 Aria
11:22 LibreOffice
13:48 Other recommendations

Remember, your privacy is largely in your hands, and you can choose not to use products and services that collect all your data. If you have alternative products that you like and think we should check out, let us know!

If you're looking for online, collaborative alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft 365, watch:

Brought to you by NBTV members: Lee Rennie, Sam Ettaro, Will Sandoval, and Naomi Brockwell.

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Here are a bunch of products I like and use. Using these links helps support the channel and future videos!

Recommended Books:

Beginner's Introduction To Privacy - Naomi Brockwell

Permanent Record - Edward Snowden

What has the government done to our money - Rothbard

Extreme Privacy - Michael Bazzel (The best privacy book I've ever read)

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State - Glenn Greenwald

Some of my favorite products to help protect your privacy!

Faraday bag (signal stopping, to protect your fob, credit card, computer, and phone)

Data Blocker (if you're charging your phone in an unknown port, use this so that no data is transferred)

Camera tape (electrical tape is the best tape for covering phone and computer cameras)

USB-C to ethernet adapter:

Privacy Screens (use your phone and computer in public? Keep your information safe!)

Computer: (Search for the size right for your computer)

Phone: (Search for the size for your phone, decide whether you want glass or plastic!)

[turbolag]

It's amazing to me that here in the United States we have laws that are supposed to protect our privacy built right into our Bill of Rights but yet European countries seem to be doing a better job at creating and enforcing privacy laws.

[KeithBoehler]

At one point I had a bit of fear that Libre Office would not meet my needs because there are fewer features, but then i realized that anything advanced that MS Office was not even in my use case. It covers everything that I need and actually do.

[tobiasheath]

It's really depressing. I have been wanting to switch to privacy respecting alternatives for most things. Some have worked, like stopping using Google, but my biggest barrier is being blind. The most accessible software is that created by the giant corporations, who want all of my data. Sadly with these really good, privacy respecting services that don't always work, I find that people either aren't willing to work on making their software accessible or perhaps just don't have the time with everything else that's going on. And I wouldn't even mind sorting these things out myself but I don't know where to start when it comes to learning to program accessibility modules... Great video as always though.

[quillmaurer]

I've been using Libreoffice for years, have never missed MS Office. The only thing Libreoffice isn't quite as good at is inserting photos into documents, can be difficult to get them to be where you want them. Otherwise it's excellent. I suspect that 90% of users would find it to be as good or better. The problem is that MS Office is the recognized default, and many people don't even consider alternatives. I've been trying to convince my mom to stop paying $100/year for it, but she's very hesitant to ditch MS Office. I feel like commercial software has been getting worse all the time, with this sort of spying, subscription models, higher costs, formerly included features now as paid extras, and so on. Honestly I hope it keeps getting worse, as that will convince people to ditch them in favor of Free Open Source alternatives.

[xoxoxar]

I recently saw your presentation regarding privacy at an infosec conference and I wanted to talk to you in person, but you were busy, rightfully! I really appreciate you sharing this information and education more individuals. I really admire your passion regarding this! We all should be as passionate as you regarding our privacy and data collection habits...

[justananarchist]

There should be more people with the same mentality as you.
I mean the government, companies etc spy on you every single day!

I love your vids ❤️

[GRBtutorials]

And for those of us who prefer the ribbon interface of Office 2007+, LibreOffice has an option to change the old interface to the ribbon.

[Thomas-poex]

We use Microsoft Office daily at my work so its kind of difficult to just jump ship right now. Even so, I have used Libre in the past but I always find myself coming back to Microsoft Office. The main problems I have with Libre Office is not knowing where some of the more niche options are fairly frequently and lots of formatting issues. There have been countless times where I will either work on a file or be sent a file from the Microsoft office platform and when I open it in Libre Office the formatting is different, pictures are misaligned, different fonts are used, etc. Similarly, when sending files from Libre to a Microsoft Office user the formatting tends to get messed up again even when using the office formats through Libre. When I was using Libre I found myself needing to fix formatting from my Libre created files using Microsoft Office to ensure formatting was consistent for the end user which was just extra unnecessary work. Libre Office is definitely a great alternative for simple/intermediate Office tasks but when dealing with a more complex/and or commercial setting Microsoft Office still feels superior to me. It is upsetting that Microsoft collects so much data though.

[timincal]

Naomi spreading her actress wings, she's actually really good in character.
The draw of collecting personal data to turn into $$$ is huge, it's all but ubiquitous now. So it isn't surprising Microsoft would lean heavily into this revenue source (not just Office/O365, buying LinkedIn was another personal data goldmine). The MSFT financial reporting categories makes it difficult to see what revenue increase data harvesting and processing is happening. But I'd be shocked if this isn't one of their growing revenue categories.

[pqsk]

Now I'd love to see a similar video on Apple's office suite. I used to use LibreOffice for many years and then switched to Apple and started to use their suite since it synced across devices. I mainly use it for writing resumes and personal finance and occasionally for writing documents for work. When it comes to excel I use gnumeric when I need to do some more advanced cell conditionals. I've tried different apps for LibreOffice on iOS/macOS and they work but they aren't good and painful to deal with versioning. Anyways great video as always

[tootalldan]

Thanks Naomi for presenting. For what it's worth, I still use Office 2010 which doesn't go to the cloud for a license check and runs what I need. It's all about if you can live with "features" added in to the application but then subscriptions is a scary road for applications. Not a big fan of that!

[pulpostr]

OMG thank God you made this video! I came out of therapy from a really strong traumatic childhood memory, I decided to type on Word what I said in session.
I started getting ads right after of toys( and other things)... Clearly 18+... I was triggered, horrified, very upset, cried. Never again did I used it.

[dbadaddy]

I prefer the one-time license versions, mostly because I don't care about subscriptions when I have something that works for me. The one-time licenses are slightly less of a problem. That's because the subscription version offers features the one-time licenses can, such as transcriptions. I will probably keep one machine with a subscription for those additional services and to play games, and my other machines are transitioning to open source and eventually Linux. I had an issue once where LibreOffice would consistently take more than two minutes to open an Excel file which opened in just over a second using Excel on the same machine. Once open LibreOffice worked fine, but opening Excel files was ridiculously long. Word files worked fine.

[outbackeddie]

That does it - I'm going back to a 1970's IBM Selectric typewritter for all my word processing needs. Well, maybe not, but I'm definitely going to try Libre Office. Thanks for another great privacy video.

[danieljackson]

Bravo. A wonderful presentation. I've been using LibreOffice since it started (before that I used Open Office). My ONLY beef with the program has to do with the Outline Mode. In Word, sub headings and text can be hidden. This is ONE function I would love to have in LibreOffice since I use Outline Mode a great deal.

[spbeckman]

Libra office works if you don't need to share with MS Office users. Free Office seems to be better at this. Also Libra Office has issues when trying to manage and format large documents, i.e. 40+ pages with multiple sections and mixed styles.

Otherwise, it is quite good for small personal documents.

[Cotictimmy]

I hadn't heard this, but I always suspected it. If people are in a position to gather more data & power, then they will do it (unless there are strong measures in place to prevent them.) All the corporations are attempting to capture & study customers in order to permanently extract from them.

[igorgiuseppe]

one important thing you forgot to mention is: the reason why we can trust libre office that much is because its open source, programmers can read the code to make sure its not spying on users, and non programmers can trust programmers to review the code for then and let then know if something goes wrong with the code.

another thing to consider is, since its open source, if you know how to code you can add your own features to if, if you dont know, you can hire any programmer to add new features to it, if you cant afford you can crowd fund it, or simply donate to the project.

[Meiane]

Funny thing is i actually discovered the other day on the app store that microsoft word was collecting so much identifiable data and then boom now you made a video about it!

[johnnymidas]

I TRULY APPRECIATE YOUR WORK NAOMI... THANK YOU. 🙏❤