Microsoft has a setting that could make you rethink what “private” actually means for your Word documents.

Most people assume that if a document is sitting on their computer or in their personal OneDrive, it’s completely private.

But Microsoft has connected experiences that can process content to power things like AI features, recommendations and other services.

And honestly, most people probably have no idea any of this is happening.

If you want to check what’s turned on, open Word or Excel and go to:

Account Settings → Account Privacy → Manage Settings

Then look for Connected Experiences and review the optional settings.

You can turn off the ones you don’t actually need.

Because think about what’s sitting inside your documents.

Work stuff.

Personal notes.

Financial information.

Passwords.

Business ideas.

Things you probably never intended to share with anyone.

And this is the part I think people are going to have an opinion about:

If you didn’t know Microsoft could process content through these connected features, would you want that turned off?

I’m genuinely curious.

Did you already know about this, or did you assume your Word documents were completely private?