Reminder About The Limits of Self-Collection
Hiding Data from Copilot serves as a reminder of what data users can't collect themselves. Also, how do Tags work in Teams?
I was reading Tony Redmond’s post about how to block Copilot from accessing certain information in SharePoint, and one of his solutions (admittedly not the recommended one) was to block the site library from SharePoint search.
It reminded me of one of the lesser-known ways asking users to self-collect data from M365 is a bad idea.
As Tony explains in the article, setting that option in a SharePoint library prevents the documents from being indexed for search and thus prevents Copiloting from using the text. This also means that if you try a keyword search in the SharePoint web or other M365 tools, these documents will also not appear in the results.
It reminded me that there is a massive difference between the search results you get using the native eDiscovery tools versus the internal search tools of each M365 workflow. Even a Global Administrator with access to all SharePoint sites could be missing some stuff. For example, I created a document with the code 20240220 in a SharePoint site that I hid from searching following Tony’s post’s instructions. Sure enough, I can’t find it using SharePoint search.
Searches run from Purview, however, did locate it:
This prime example demonstrates the different indexes the Purview tools use compared to what is accessible to a user inside M365.
Where else do we see a limitation on user’s ability to collect their data from M365?
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