Forum Discussion
How to reveal anonymous submissions in Microsoft Forms
Karol Grodzicki any situation where with an anonymous response it would be possible to find out the the details of the responder would be really worrying from a legal point of view.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User
RobElliott This is the result of experiments we recently did in administration team before deciding if it can be used in important secret votings inside of organization. And in enterprise tenant we could find the vote's authors with such cross-corelation.
If you want to reproduce it, 30 minutes after voting open Exchange Online powershell and type something like this:
You'll get their votes from last day. If you also have the result excel, you can find which vote is which.
It looks like there are two remedies:
1. Disable audit logs
2. Require organizer to export excel right after voting, remove ID and date columns, sort the results, delete the forms (+ delete from recycle bin). That prevents even global admins from getting the result excel
Global admins in Microsoft365 are pretty powerful (and even more powerful are on-premise admins). The security & compliance features allow pretty deep insight into mail contents or OneDrive files. That's the way IT works, you need to trust IT 😉
- What part of "anonymous" do you not understand? Any form which you have told a responder will be anonymous MUST be anonymous by law.
RobElliott I DO understand it. Although it all depends on local law - AFAIK not all countries even allow full anonymity (I guess example could be China).
Anyway, MS365 Terms&Conditions say "You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your Microsoft account" (and there are many other liability-related similar points). So if you use MS Forms to create an anonymous survey, you are also responsible for ensuring the anonymity. From technical PoV it's possible to fail it even accidentally. So it's worth knowing there is such a risk.
And of course, I strongly discourage abusing this the anonymity in this way (unless e.g. agreed by all participants). But we need to be conscious and transparent about this
I just tried doing a search as you referenced and it looks like they have fixed this as anonymous responses now show as anonymous and do not appear to be tied to any users or IPs.
