Privacy changes to Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics

Hi,

was this information communicated in advance via some other location? Without such communication, applications dependent on the previous behavior and setting are suddenly broken, requiring customer to react.

Rob O

Was this announced in the M365 or Azure Admin Message Center? There is also nothing about anonymizing usage data in the M365 Road Map, other than a reference to Teams usage anonymization in May 2021. Please share where this was announced or communicated prior to August 30th 2021 for a Sept. 1 2021 implementation. This change broke several reports in our environment that require user information to be in the report. We have reverted, but would have appreciated advanced communication. Thank you!

You need to update the documentation of the affected methods to indicate that some fields will be anonymized.

Ex.  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/reportroot-getemailactivityuserdetail?view=graph-rest-1.0

EmanuelVazquez we do not provide the ability to decrypt the information.  Manikandan_N , we include the option to bolster privacy for users while still enabling IT professionals to measure adoption trends, track license allocation and determine license renewal in Microsoft 365.  There is no mapping between the settings.  The change described in the article is to modify the default setting to hide user level information from 'off' to 'on'. We did not modify the functionality of the product with this change, just the default setting which can be reverted using the method described above. 

Bonjour,

Depuis que cette fonctionnalité a été activée, nous avons une série de chiffres et de lettres à la place des username.

Par contre, dans les paramètres de l'organisation > Rapports, l'option est bien cochée.

En décochant l'option "Show identifiable user information in reports", on retrouve bien les noms ou adresses mails dans les rapports.

Il y a soit un problème de traduction, soit un problème de fonctionnalité.

Merci d'avance

There is some way to decode the pseudonymize data? there are some graph endpoint to recover the user information?

EmanuelVazquez 

Yes : 

Global administrators can revert this change for their tenant and view identifiable user information if their organization's privacy practices permit. 
This can be done in the Microsoft 365 admin center by going to Settings> Organization Settings> Services and selecting Reports. 
Under Choose how to display user information, deselect Display identifiable user information in reports. 

Is it possible to get the same kind of pseudonymization on other graph endpoints?

It would be great to be able to tie data to departments or countries (not necessarily individual users) by combining the data with https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users.

downtownmtb-Allina Robert Osborne Thank you for taking the time to share the impact this change has had. This change was announced via the Microsoft 365 public roadmap and message center in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. The announcement was provided with 30 days notice in line with our standard notification procedures for this type of change.

Axel Andersen I’m not aware of any further efforts regarding pseudonymization for other graph endpoints, we will provide your request to the Graph API team and ask them to reach out.

James_Bell please can you share the relevant items?

I can only see roadmap feature ID 70774 last modified in June, which refers to admins "will have the option" to anonymise, not that it would be switched to on by default.

The Message Center does not have anything relevant against searches for "privacy", "anonymize", "anonymous".