Yes, unless Microsoft doesn't ask for consent in whatever country the author is from. There's a consent popup that you need to click through that informs you that the content of your slides are shared with Microsoft. This is part of "intelligent services" in case you're looking for the details.
The author should be able to turn this feature off easily, but yes, they did consent to this. They just might have done so months ago and forgotten about it.
The text on that page is extraordinarily misleading, if indeed "Connected experiences" are sending your data to MS servers. Nothing on the page is explicit about the apps sending your data to MS, the only hint that this is happening is the footnote that these "Connected experiences" do not work if you are not connected to the Internet.
For example, here is the description of the first type of such experiences:
> Connected experiences that analyze your content
> Connected experiences that analyze your content are experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Translator.
> The following table provides a list of connected experiences that analyze your content and also provides links to more information about them.
They are going to quite long lengths to avoid mentioning where the data is analyzed.
The consent popup that shows up before you enable these features explicitly talks about sending document content to Microsoft. Their privacy policy is unreadable just like any other big tech company's is, but I don't think a normal user who's actually read the popup before clicking "OK" can miss that document content is being sent to Microsoft.
I think it's safe to say that nobody reads consent popups and just clicks okay to make the magical prompts disappear but there's only so much you can do when you offer online stuff in your offline program. I don't think it's reasonable to expect three or four popups that say "are you really really really sure?" before enabling such a feature, especially since everything is probably being synced to Onedrive anyway.
Furthermore, the target audience of the page I've linked isn't general end users, it's for administrators managing company wide Office installs. I don't have Office installed so I don't have the exact link the prompts try to direct you to, but there's probably a better privacy page that you can find from within an Office install.
At least in some countries, it legally may not constitute actual consent if the text is so unintelligible to a normal user that they don’t understand what exactly they’re consenting to. And we all know that most users just click “Agree” without understanding what exactly they’re agreeing to because that’s the only way they can get their work done.
"To provide these services, Microsoft needs to be able to collect your search terms and document content" seems pretty explicit to me. This is what the Office settings say underneath the checkbox
Another prompt ends in "Office will use your searches and document content to support and improve the Intelligent Services to you."
The individual popups seem to follow a simple "what is it, what are some examples of it, what are you consenting to" structure. Any less details and you have no idea what you're agreeing to, any more details and you'll quickly lose people in the "EULA too long" problem.
I disagree that agreeing is the only way people will get their work done. There are many ways to translate text and the "let me design a PowerPoint for you" feature is nothing more than a nice to have. There are plenty of offline themes to choose from and individual themes to download without ever enabling this setting.
> Did we consent to this?
Yes, unless Microsoft doesn't ask for consent in whatever country the author is from. There's a consent popup that you need to click through that informs you that the content of your slides are shared with Microsoft. This is part of "intelligent services" in case you're looking for the details.
The author should be able to turn this feature off easily, but yes, they did consent to this. They just might have done so months ago and forgotten about it.
Find out more about the "intelligent services" that also send the contents of your document to the cloud if you click on their respective buttons here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/conne...