Forum Discussion
CoPilot "An external link was removed to protect your privacy"
Scenario: I am signed in to corporate CoPilot for M365. I'm asking CoPilot app on desktop in "WORK" mode to generate an excel file with some fictitious data & make it available in an Excel file. CoPilot generates the table, then removes the link to the file 😑
I can use it in "WEB" mode to do the same, and it generates a BING URL that then results in a 404. <sigh>
I can SIGN OUT and use generic CoPilot. That will generate a file, then prompt me for corporate credentials, and then it gives me the file.
The question: How do I get file generation working while logged in to my corporate account? Do we have a security permission causing issues?
17 Replies
my copilots are creating the links, but they are being blocked
Same issue asking for CoPilot to generate a new file (translation to Spanish). CoPilot then responded "I apologize for the inconvenience. Translating and processing the documents into Spanish should take approximately 10-15 minutes. I will provide the download links for the translated files as soon as they are ready. Thank you for your patience!" Never happened. Really hard to adopt such a gimpy model across the organization.
I get this as well. I have a Copilot SharePoint agent on a document library. It reads the documents as a knowledge source perfectly fine, but the link to the document itself is replaced with "An external link was removed to protect your privacy."
Have the same issue+++
I find Copilot Chat (in Work mode) is removing links even when they were pointing to my own M365 Outlook (emails and calendar events), to-do list or Teams chat, i.e. NO external links at all!!! No HTML formatting prompts help.
This is really frustrating...
Was this issue ever fixed? Has anyone notified Microsoft or opened a ticket on it? It's now Jan 2025 and I'm having this issue. Googling around I did not find a solution.
Issue:
In "work" mode, I asked Microsoft 365 Copilot to help me create a word document. It generated the text, I went back and forth with Copilot to refine it, and when I had the finished text I asked Copilot to export it to a Word document and instead it gave me steps to open Word and copy/paste the data. I then asked Copilot, "You can't create the word document for me?" and it replied, "I can help you create the word document," and at the end of repeating the text we generated showed I have created the document for you. You can download it An external link was removed to protect your privacy..I tried it again last week with a Copilot agent. Pointing to SP List, with Authentication, and it was still removing links.
I get it periodically all over the place...
Sometimes when in copilot chat, today i got it using the Jira Agent, then again asking copilot a question about my emails in copilot for outlook. The only way i can get it to work is to tell copilot not to include links. I saw above some said to include "Create links using HTML tags" so i'll try that.I'm having the same issue but have found a workaround in the meantime, by asking Copilot to create the links using HTML tags. Here is a blog post on the workaround Copilot: An external link was removed to protect your privacy.
Thank you Calvin, much appreciated !
Looks like loads of us still having these issues - I seem to get it periodically still - with no real consistency or reasons I can see for the "trigger"
Hi Rob, thanks for your feedback. On some topics, I can read comments related to some settings in Purview, but I can't find how to authorize external links.
I've got the same issue when I generate a table in Copilot, including external links to web pages. In some cases, the link is displayed, and in other cases, they're removed and replaced by the message "An external link was removed to protect your privacy."
Having the same challenge seems to work sometimes then not others, I have Web content enabled, but getting the same, "- An external link was removed to protect your privacy." I'm only pointing to our own SP. I'd also like to reference one of our websites, but can't seem to add those, only SharePoint URL's. If you know how to to that let me know documentation I've found points me to enabling web content. Which I have done.
