Microsoft Office 365

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Microsoft 365 (previously named Office 365) is a family of software, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel. The branding Office 365 was introduced in 2010 to refer to its subscription-based software as a service, including hosted services such as Office on the web.

Microsoft Office 365

File:Microsoft 365 (2022).svg.png

Basic Information
Release Year	2010
Product Type	Software
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://www.office.com/

In 2017, it was renamed to Microsoft 365.

Consumer Impact Summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Add your text below this box. Once this section is complete, delete this box by clicking on it and pressing backspace.

Incidents

Microsoft Copilot on by default

In the current version of Office 365, Microsoft Copilot is turned on by default. It can be turned off in some of the Office applications' options, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Copilot up-sell (Oct. 2024)

Microsoft has been accused of misleading customers from around October 2024 by suggesting they had to move to higher-priced Microsoft 365 personal and family plans that included Copilot.

In January 2025, YouTuber Atomic Shrimp reported that Microsoft had enacted a "forced up-sell" of 365's new AI Copilot feature. Users with basic accounts (now called "Classic"), such as Shrimp himself, had been informed their subscription fee was going up, but that they would enjoy new features as a result, including Copilot. In his efforts to disable Copilot, Shrimp subsequently discovered that Microsoft now offered "Classic" plans, identical to the old basic plans both in features and in subscription fee. The option to downgrade to Classic, however, was only clearly visible to enterprise users, not to personal users. In essence Microsoft upgraded users' plans without their consent and hid the option to downgrade. While Atomic Shrimp's video suggested contacting support to revert to the "Classic" plan, it is possible to downgrade a personal account through the website via the cancellation process.

In October 2025, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sued Microsoft over the change, accusing it of misleading about 2.7 million customers. "The ACCC alleges that since 31 October 2024, Microsoft has told subscribers of Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans with auto-renewal enabled that to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription. The ACCC alleges this information provided to subscribers was false or misleading because there was an undisclosed third option, the Microsoft 365 Personal or Family Classic plans, which allowed subscribers to retain the features of their existing plan, without Copilot, at the previous lower price."

File Request

File request, a common feature in other cloud service providers' free plans, that allows you to invite users to anonymously upload files to a designated cloud folder (e.g., group vacation photos) is only available in personal plans if every uploader is logged-in to a Microsoft account. If you want anonymous uploads, you have to upgrade to a One Drive for Business-Account. Since this is a common feature in other providers' free private plans (e.g. Dropbox), consumers subconsciously expect it to be a feature in paid personal OneDrive plans of the highest tier, but it's not offered.

Obfuscation of local saving in favor of OneDrive

Since the introduction of Office 365, saving files locally has been made more difficult due to Windows favoring of OneDrive, its cloud-based storage service. When saving a file previously, the user would encounter the save dialog with a pop-up to browse their computer and choose a file-storage location. This is now multiple clicks away, making it harder to avoid saving the file on OneDrive.

Files on one's computer are also automatically uploaded to OneDrive by default, causing numerous issues (such as synchronization errors and duplicate files). Turning off this automatic backup is not user-friendly, as the user must navigate multiple settings to disable this option.

The user can go into Options > Save > Set the check mark on "save locally as default". This still requires multiple clicks to save a file, but the cloud options are marginally less intrusive.

Forced Diagnostic Data Transmission

Versions other than the Enterprise or Education volume licensing editions do not allow turning telemetry off fully. Moreover, the setting is configured to the least private setting by default.

Office transmits data about 23 000 to 25 000 different types of events (other reports in context of the German BSI audit speak of 30 000 types of events) to Microsoft. Microsoft can adjust the level of detail transmitted remotely. This can go up to every single keystroke being broadcast live to Microsoft servers in the background.

Given that it is not uncommon in some countries even for hospital to run consumer versions of the software, the privacy implications are tremendous. It cannot reasonably be assumed that any data entered into nor any interaction with a Microsoft Office application will stay private.

Publisher Removal from Microsoft 365 Computers (Oct. 2026)

In October 2026, Microsoft will be removing Publisher from computers with Microsoft 365 as part of their "end of support" of the application.

Automatically saving Word Documents to the Cloud (August 2025)

In its company blog, Microsoft announced that Word would from now on create documents and save their autosave information to Microsoft servers by default. This setting can be manually reconfigured to use the local computer.

This leads to all information in the document being uploaded to Microsoft servers even before a user has the chance to select local storage when first saving the document.

How to avoid Price Increase (At least for Microsoft 365 Personal Subscriptions)

File:Screenshot 2025-04-05 205541.jpg

Cancel Microsoft 365 Personal Screenshot, showing the cheaper subscription plan

If you currently have a "Microsoft 365 Personal" subscription, and don't want to pay the $30 price increase, there is a way to "revert" back to the $69.99 subscription. Sign in to your Microsoft account, and go to your current subscriptions. Click on your "Microsoft 365 Personal" subscription, then click on cancel subscription. It will then give you the option to switch to the "Microsoft 365 Personal Classic" subscription (see image to right for reference), which is Microsoft's new name for what was the "Microsoft 365 Personal" subscription. There is a reddit thread on how to do this, which is linked if you want to read through it as well.

See also

• Software as a service
• Dark pattern
• Microsoft