Forum Discussion
Automatic sensitivity label on existing labeled documents and emails
If I enable today automatic sensitivity labeling for label "Confidential" on behalf on sensitive information type "Credit Card" and 1000 documents are labeled with the label "Confidential". What happend if I remove the sensitive information type "Credit Card" from the label "Confidential", and put it on the Automatic sensitivity label "Highly Confidential". What happend to the 1000 documents which already have the label "Confidential"? Will it be modified to "Highly Confidential" or not?
2 Replies
Good question. It really comes down to how those 1000 documents got the "Confidential" label in the first place.
If users manually applied "Confidential" to those documents, nothing happens. Your new auto-labeling policy won't touch them. Microsoft is firm on this one. Automatic labeling does not override manually applied labels. Period.
Now if "Confidential" was applied through an auto-labeling policy or as a default label, that's a different story. "Highly Confidential" sits higher in the label priority order, so the new policy will upgrade those documents. One thing to keep in mind though. The documents still need to match the conditions on your new policy. If those files still contain credit card numbers, they'll get relabeled. If the data's been removed, the policy won't flag them.
Worth mentioning that Exchange works a little differently here. There's a setting in auto-labeling policies called "Automatically replace existing labels that have the same or lower priority." Turn that on and it'll override even manually labeled emails. That option only exists for email though. SharePoint and OneDrive don't have it.
Microsoft covers the override behavior in detail here: https://learn.microsoft.com/purview/apply-sensitivity-label-automatically#will-an-existing-label-be-overridden
Prathista IlangoMicrosoft
Hello khhaj,
If the existing label is applied via automatic labelling (like in your case), and if the new label is of higher priority, then it applies. If existing label is of higher priority, then it won't change.
For more info on priority, refer to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/sensitivity-labels#label-priority-order-matters
Hope this helps!
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