Microsoft Copilot privacy: what to check before you use it at work

Microsoft's rules for Copilot depend on how you sign in. A personal account and a work account are not the same.

What we read

Microsoft's support page "Privacy and responsible AI" for Copilot and the Copilot help home page, both read on 13 November 2026. The privacy overview is short. We summarise it and point you to the pages that it links to, rather than guess the details.

What the overview says

The page says that when you sign in to Copilot with your personal Microsoft account, your use of Copilot is governed by the Microsoft Services Agreement and the Copilot Terms of Use, and that for how Microsoft uses personal data you should see the Microsoft Privacy Statement. It lists further articles: Your privacy controls and choices, Your activity history, Copilot for young people and a Transparency Note. It describes Copilot as integrated into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, bringing the files and information you use into one experience, and notes that specific features vary by subscription.

Personal account or work account

Microsoft makes a point of the difference. With a work or school account the rules come from your organisation's agreement with Microsoft and the settings that your administrator chose. We did not read those terms, which vary by organisation. If you use Copilot with a work account, ask your IT administrator what is stored, who can see it and whether it is used for training.

Checklist before you use it with work files

1. Which account are you signed in with, personal or work?
2. Read "Your privacy controls and choices" and "Your activity history" for that account type, and find the switches.
3. Check what the tool can access: Copilot can work with your files and mail when permitted, which is useful and which is exactly why access rules matter.
4. Check the licence: the help page offers a way to check your Copilot licence and see which features your account includes.
5. Follow your workplace's AI rules (see the template on this site).
6. Keep private identifiers out of prompts, as with every tool.

Copilot in the apps

Because Copilot sits inside Word, Excel and Outlook, it is easy to forget that your document or mailbox is being sent to a service. Treat a request such as "summarise this email thread" like sending the thread to an assistant: fine for ordinary work, not for confidential material unless your organisation says so.

What we did not verify

We did not read Microsoft's privacy controls and activity history articles, so this page does not state retention periods or training rules for Copilot. Read the current articles and, for work accounts, your administrator's policy.

This is an independent guide. It is not connected with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft or any other AI company; product names belong to their owners. Statements about companies are taken from their own help pages as read on 13 and 14 November 2026. The prompts are our own wording and were not run against every tool. Not legal, financial or professional advice.