Most of you will already know that this is a powerful text editor which is part of Microsoft’s own office suite. This is a company that has at times been involved in a multitude of privacy-related controversies. We just have to talk about the telemetry that Windows 10 carries out by default. However, this is not something that is reduced only by the operating system of the company. When we talk about telemetry we refer to the collection of certain usage data by the program itself to send them to the company’s servers.
Therefore, this is something that is not only carried out in Windows, but it is extended to several applications and services of the same firm. This is the case of the text editor we talked about before, Word. Thus, depending on the type of documents with which we work in this application, sometimes we are interested in increasing privacy in it. It is for all this that we will help you below.
Specifically, we are going to show you how to improve and increase privacy when working in Microsoft Word quickly and easily.
Do not send any more diagnostic data from Word
To configure the privacy options of this text editor, we must go to the File menu and click on Options. In the new window that appears, specifically in the General section, we find a button in the right pane called Options Privacy, where we click. The first thing we should know is that as it happens in Windows 10, this program is responsible for sending basic diagnostic data to Microsoft.
But so that the amount of this information is as little as possible and thus increase our privacy, we recommend that you deactivate the option Optional diagnostic data.
In this way we limit the sending of information both related to Office applications, as well as other programs that we have installed on the PC.
Disable content analysis
Another somewhat controversial option that we can find in Microsoft’s text editor is one that offers us experiences for the analysis of the content that we create here. The functions that we are talking about here and that by default we can find activated, the Redmond firm justifies them as to improve future versions.
From that comfortable they know first-hand the uses of this program and can improve it in the future. However, for many users it is nothing more than a violation of your privacy so they tend to disable these options. Thus, so that a content analysis is not done, we go back to the previously mentioned window through Options. In it, we only have to deactivate the Experiences function that analyze the content.
Avoid downloading unauthorized content
On the other hand, we find the functionality of connected experiences. This is responsible for downloading certain content for certain Office programs, including the aforementioned Word, in principle to improve our user experience. However, some of these items that are downloaded without our consent may adversely affect the privacy of use.
That is why we also recommend deactivating this function integrated in the program from the window mentioned above. In this case, we just have to uncheck the All connected experiences selector. Keep in mind that even if we deactivate this, both the updates and the mail download will continue to work.
