Microsoft affirms that the Windows Copilot application is completely harmless and does not steal user data

The whole of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show that Microsoft is betting heavily on artificial intelligence and its partnership with OpenAI to make Copilot a reality. The company has invested billions of dollars in this area, they want to ensure customers know about their products and more importantly use them. So it's no surprise that the company is willing to integrate and promote Copilot everywhere.

However, Microsoft's eagerness to deploy Copilot has also gotten the company into many troubles. Back in early March, Microsoft released an Edge update that resulted in Out of Memory (OOM) errors even on systems with enough RAM. Under pressure from the community, the Redmond company was forced to remove the update and explained that the Defender s feature was the cause of the error. Less than a month later, another buggy update hit Edge, and this time, an 8KB Microsoft Copilot entry was discovered in the Windows 11 installed apps list. Once again, the update was removed when major technology newspapers started reporting on it.

Microsoft affirms that the Windows Copilot application is completely harmless and does not steal user data Picture 1

That's just one of many examples of unannounced changes that Microsoft has quietly rolled out. There is also the recent appearance of a new "UCPD driver" that blocks Registry hacks related to default application selection.

Microsoft has now confirmed that this is a bug, but at the same time asserted that the application is harmless because it does not run any code in the background, and also does not collect user data at all. The company explains in a blog post:

Updates to Edge browser version 123.0.2420.65, released on March 28, 2024 to date, may have incorrectly installed the new MSIX package (named 'Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows' on Windows devices. This causes the Microsoft Copilot app to appear in the Installed section of the Settings menu.

This installation package is actually released in preparation for some plans to expand Windows Copilot support in the future, and is not intended for all Windows devices. This may cause Microsoft Copilot to show up as part of the list of installed applications, but in reality no application is fully activated or installed.

It is important to note that Microsoft does not execute any code or process, nor does it collect, analyze, or transmit device or environment data in any situation from users through Copilot on Windows

If true, this is definitely good news after the recent series of problems with Windows 11 that Microsoft is facing. The issue became hotter after a series of former Microsoft engineers publicly criticized the "bad" performance of Windows 11.

Jessica Tanner

Update 20 April 2024