Random people showing up in Track Changes??

Anonymous
2023-02-05T00:30:48+00:00

I am doing revisions on a novel and random people are now showing up in the track changes. I have not shared this document with anyone, but it is stored in my OneDrive. How did these people's names get in my document? They are coming up as reviewers and their names are attached to changes I've made.

This is incredibly concerning and a HUGE privacy violation. Has anyone else seen this??

For what it is worth, I've googled these people and I have NO connection to them at all. But one thing I did notice is that LinkedIn profiles appear for all of them near the top of the Google results. One of them is the CMO of Whole Foods?? I, personally, do not have a LinkedIn profile nor have I ever.

Microsoft Word for Mac v16.69.1

macOS 13.2

EDIT: I updated the screenshot to remove content of document.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | Other | MacOS

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  1. Stefan Blom 353.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2023-02-18T10:30:23+00:00

    Microsoft does read the input they receive through the Feedback facility. They won't necessarily respond, though, even if you ask them to do so.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-02-17T12:07:11+00:00

    Dear all,

    I have the same issue.

    In my instance this only affects document formatting (highlighting and text size).

    Has anyone seen any change to fundamental content? Or to comments?

    Many thanks,

    Jon

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-02-14T12:25:48+00:00

    Hi Jim,

    The Word Product Team have opened a bug report for this issue, which had been reported by some enterprise customers. Therefore, we can expect a fix in due course.

    Hi Doug -

    Do we have a Bug ID for this? Wanted to pass it along to the MS engineer on my premier case.

    Thanks

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  4. Diane Poremsky MVP 17,541 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2023-02-08T16:13:57+00:00

    Thanks. We'll find out. It usually is enough and will have all the information they need.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-02-07T18:55:13+00:00

    This is clearly some kind of bug. We had the same issue so I made a test document and had 5 people edit it with Tracked Changes on. Everything seemed fine but eventually I reopened it and saw it added an "Author" to my list of Specific People. Author was listed as having made some formatting changes that I had made. It seems most if not all of the changes from these phantom accounts we've seen have been formatting and we've confirmed no one unauthorized has accessed the files.

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