Restart Office to apply changes to your privacy settings - endless notices

Update: More Bad News

As of mid-2019? (best I can tell from other forums), if you are using a gmail, icloud or another email server other than MS, your connection (ability to use) to the other-than-MS server will fail, unless you have "Connected experiences" checked in your Office Privacy Settings....

Hi,

I have two Gmail accounts, currently connected simultaneously, and they connect to the Google servers without any obvious issue. The yellow flag has currently disappeared for the time being , but the connection to the Google servers was not an issue when the restart/privacy warning messages were active. The Connected Experiences setting needs to be switched on in order to synch your privacy settings with other devices - that's completely bonkers and you should not be forced to endure the other intrusive settings to achieve this.

This is an update to my previous post.  Again, I began experiencing this since my O365 subscription renewed.

On my desktop, in addition to the yellow banner and since I first posted, on a single occasion I got a full-blown browser presentation from MS, explaining the details of what's happening.  Not clearly why, but what.  I'll explain what I believe the "why" is.

Once I went into Files>Office Account>Privacy, and unchecked the boxes that were giving my extended data away, I've continued to get the yellow banner.  However, my privacy settings don't get changed from what I set them to, after I restart Office (which will happen one way or another).

I now just close the yellow banner notice with the X button and go on with my business, because as soon as Office is closed in any manner, the next time it's opened, it will have done whatever it does when it says "Restart Required".

Even though I have all my privacy boxes unchecked, if I had left one checked, such as "Online experiences" (for an example, that's what is required for any extended dictionary look-ups), any new changes MS has made to "Online experiences" functionality, would not take effect until the Office app is restarted.

Why?  Because rather than MS sending a notice of privacy changes to be reviewed and agreed to on some sort of weekly or monthly schedule, they are having us agree to those changes before they are applied by restarting Office (any of Outlook, Excel, Word, etc.)  This is the result of MS applications running as a "service."

If you weren't giving any data away to begin with (according to your Office privacy settings), then you don't really agree to anything when Office restarts.  Regardless, that doesn't keep it from feeling intrusive.

Caveat:  I suspect that under some circumstances, such as subscription renewal, or a slip of the "whatever," MS might change our Office Privacy Settings. As such, it wouldn't hurt to check them every so often.

Sorry but I'm not interested in Office analyzing my content so won't allow this.

Ditto

Double-Ditto.

I agree, and I'm still speculating about how this is exactly working because I haven't yet received the notice again so that I can drill deeper.  My hunch is they are getting around this by changing the privacy setting as a part of the reboot.  I'm pretty sure there will be a way to avoid their intentions, but it will be obscure and annoying and time-consuming to do so.

I think the issue with frequency has to do with Office development being spread across numerous MS development teams, who then compete internally, leaving the end-users to suffer their impetuous tweaking.  On the other hand I'm old and cranky about all this, and I could be wrong, but not totally so...

The worst of all is that with the end of Windows 8.1 (except Enterprise editions) a dedicated, MS beta testing department pretty much disappeared.  The consumer now does the beta-testing; some voluntary with pre-releases, the remainder by proxy of the fact the software has been just plain buggy when released.  However, I've noticed much improvement in just the last 2 years, in relation to Windows 10.

Possibly, the worst-case of forced, end-user labor has become the iOS platform.

This issue became a problem for me right after I had to reinstall office on a freshly installed Windows 10 Pro.  I have only started troubleshooting, this morning, but I'm guessing this has to do with "connected services" at one or more levels, locations, etc. 

The required reboot is also an indicator to review your privacy settings, as well as any changes Microsoft has made to a particular Office service's privacy policy, since the last time you opened the Office application.

With all of the possible "connected services" that exist across multiple Office components, and with the present generation of MS developers' propensity to tweak their application(s), then boot them out to us in an essentially alpha development stage, it's no wonder this is happening on a nearly a daily basis.

I hear people saying, "but I don't have "connected services" enabled.  Well, that may be true of yesterday, but each and every update (not just the announced ones) carries with it a probability that your privacy settings get changed, especially when the updates have directly related changes to "connected services." 

The only way to move "alpha-stage" services through a development cycle is to rigorously test them.  For a "connected service" to get tested, it needs to be utilized, and to get it utilized requires end users to use it.  That's not gonna happen in a timely manner when a very significant number of end users have these "connected services" turned off.  This is only going to get more common.

I'm making this observation based on my past application developer experience with a Fortune 500 corporation.  I believe we won't hear directly from Microsoft because they're the ones surreptitiously turning our "connected services" back on.  Then, when we reboot without reading MS' updated privacy policy, we just gave them permission to leave the privacy setting as they just got reconfigured.

For me, privacy isn't so much the issue.  The problem is that every software company wants at least some of my metadata, and if I approve them all, it buries almost any hope of tracing rogue, outbound firewall traffic, should I need to determine if there is malware loose on my network.

Privacy was dead over 10 years ago . . .