Windows 11 users beware: Microsoft may be sharing your Outlook emails without you knowing. Here’s how to stop this
It looks like Microsoft’s tendency to collect its users’ data could land the company in even more trouble, with a worrying new report suggesting it’s sharing more information from emails sent by the new Outlook for Windows app than people might know.
This is especially concerning because most people check their email daily to keep in touch with friends and family, or to send important documents and information at work. With the Outlook for Windows app now the default for emails in Windows 11, this discovery could affect a lot of people
MSPoweruser reports that the team behind ProtonMail, an end-to-end encrypted email service and competitor to Microsoft Outlook, has discovered the worrying extent of user data collected by Outlook for Windows, which reportedly includes your emails, contacts, browsing history and possibly even location data.
ProtonMail’s blog post goes so far as to call Outlook for Windows “a targeted advertising monitoring tool,” a harsh statement to be sure, but people who have downloaded the new Outlook for Windows app have come across a disclaimer explaining how Microsoft and hundreds of third parties will help themselves to your data.
It appears that the majority of the data is used primarily for advertising purposes, with users having to opt out of having their data manually shared for each of the 772 companies. This means you’re sharing a lot of information by default, and if you want to unsubscribe, the process is time-consuming and tedious.
Here we go again …
Microsoft has a rather questionable history of being quite greedy with user data. This time last year you might remember it our report describing serious privacy issues users had with Windows 11, where the PC Security Channel was a Youtube video revealing that before you even connected to the internet or opened an app, Windows 11 was collecting data and sending it to Microsoft – and possibly third-party servers.
That said, we shouldn’t forget that ProtonMail is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s email apps and services, and the team behind it would love to direct criticism at Outlook for Windows. ProtonMail is a service committed to user privacy and keeping users’ email (as well as calendar, file storage, and VPN) encrypted, so we have to consider the team’s motives for highlighting this bring, as the company would like to make its name clear, privacy and security look much better than Outlook.
We also have to take into account the fact that Outlook for Windows is a free app, so you could argue that Microsoft can support the app and keep adding features by providing user data to paying third parties. Anyway, while you can technically opt out of data sharing, it’s still brazen of Microsoft to make the opt-out option consist of a toggle click per advertiser rather than a simple ‘decline all’ – knob. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Unsubscribe as soon as possible!
If you’re concerned about all this and want to unsubscribe altogether, we have the solution for you. Go to the General section of your Outlook for Windows settings and you should see an option called ‘Ad Preferences’. When you click on that, you’ll see a large list of company names and toggles by their names will be set to ‘enable’.
Unless you’re creating a brand new Outlook email, as far as we can tell there isn’t a single button that lets you deselect them all, so you may need to set aside some time to deselect them all. Each advertiser has the option to read more about their privacy policy, and once you open that, you’ll see another option to opt out.
I created a new Outlook email account to try it out, and the option to deny everything appeared when Outlook for Windows first opened, and I also have the option to deselect all ad preferences at once on the Page Settings. although that may not appear for people who have already set up the app with an existing Outlook account.
If sharing our data by default is the price we have to pay for free apps like Outlook for Windows, Microsoft seems to have at least made disabling that sharing easier than the ProtonMail team suggested. Still, this shows that it’s worth paying attention to user agreements and disclaimers for free apps, especially from Microsoft, so you know exactly how much of your data you’re sharing – and who has access to it.