[German]Microsoft has just announced changes to the privacy settings defaults for Microsoft 365. User data for Microsoft 365 analytics is now pseudonymized by default in Microsoft 365. This change is intended to help companies comply with their local privacy laws.
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Microsoft has announced the Privacy changes to Microsoft 365 in the post Privacy changes to Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics in the tech community. As part of Microsoft's commitment to better user privacy, the company is making a change to Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics to pseudonymize user-level information by default, effective September 1, 2021. This change affects the following products and APIs and is intended to help organizations comply with local privacy laws:
- Microsoft 365 Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center
- Microsoft 365 usage reports in Microsoft Graph
- Microsoft Teams analytics and reporting in the Microsoft Teams admin center
- The reportRoot: getSharePointSiteUsageDetail API (1.0 and beta) for SharePoint site detail
These changes to the reporting and analytics capabilities of the above products are intended to improve user privacy while enabling IT professionals to measure usage trends, track licensing and determine license renewal in Microsoft 365, Microsoft writes.
Administrators, however, have the option to roll back this change for the systems they support. This can be accomplished in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (go to Settings > Organization Settings > Services and select Reports). Under Select, the option Show identifiable user information in reports can be used to specify that user information should be displayed. Displaying identifiable user information is a logged event in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center audit log.
Microsoft writes: When user identification is enabled, administrative roles and the report reader role can see identifiable user information. Global reader and usage summary reports reader roles do not have access to identifiable user information, regardless of the setting selected.
