Microsoft’s been providing backdoors to the government since Office came into popularity. Office 98(?) was found to be sending data to Microsoft. That ship sailed a long time ago. One of the “benefits” of participating in a big technology company’s monopoly.
So when I turn on my Linux PC, create a new document in Libre Office, save the document, and then turn off that PC, does the government or anyone else have access to that document?
With AI these days, all you have to do is to write a crime novel and maybe you’ll be accused of plotting a crime. The AI will read everything that everyone (literally everyone) writes, and bring its suspects to the attention of law enforcement.
I read that Microsoft takes and saves a screen shot every two seconds. So it doesn’t even matter what you actually save. Even your raw thoughts and rough drafts created in private and not saved, are stored and delivered to someone. And the AI has the bandwidth to literally evaluate everything, not just your internet chats, but literally everything ever typed. That’s why we need more datacenters. No more online jokes. You might be taken seriously and investigated. You’ve never done anything wrong, have you?
Save the document where?
On an internal disk of the PC? On a portable drive attached to the PC that is then disconnected from the PC? Local file server? SAN? In the cloud? And if it’s cloud, more details required?
And is the document password-encrypted?
My expectation would be that for the simplest scenario … unencrypted on an internal disk of the PC … then “no”, noone else has access to the document.
These questions are always really really tricky though because it is normal for an “office implementation” to create recovery files or other related files and you may not explicitly control the location of those files or exactly what happens to them once the document is saved and closed.
As an illustration, if I use LibreOffice to edit a Writer document that is on my local file server then related files are also created on the file server (while other related files are created somewhere in /tmp). So even if I subsequently securely moved the document to be local to my PC, and then shut down that PC, that related file has still existed on the file server and may not have been securely disposed of (and who knows what the deal is with the files in /tmp).
I remember 10MB removable hard disks and we’d have spin them down and lock them up at the end of the day!
To me, the worst offender is the One Drive. The IT department at work pushed out an update that bricked my company Laptop. So I had them re-image the drive. Fortunately, much of my completed work is stored in company servers. But I explicitly upload it at appropriate times after I complete it.
But for my work in progress, I keep that on the local hard drive. When I got the laptop back, something seemed wrong right away. Then I realized that none of the files on the Desktop or in the Documents folders were really there as I had placed them when moving them from the old drive which would no longer boot. I found all of those files in the One Drive. Somehow, there were same-named folders on the Desktop and in the Documents folders that were only shortcuts (without the little arrow that tells you its a shortcut) to the actual documents found in the One Drive. The Desktop and Documents folders when accessed from the file system were actually empty. I do schematic design and PCB layout work and my personal revision control system is based partially on where files with the same name reside. So most of what I was looking at was poisoned data (garbage because of scrambled revision control). Suddenly, I had lost all revision control of my work in progress as the One Drive was making copies and keeping track of them with its own system. I also lost some data by trying to erase it from the One Drive directly. It never came back to where it was on the local hard drive. Then somehow, the One Drive was making multiple different copies of the same files on its own. All of a sudden, I felt like I was under attack. I thought “oh my gosh. I have to disable this One Drive, reconstruct my local data manually (from the old hard drive that would no longer boot), and then, never let that One Drive come back”. I uninstslled the One Drive program from the laptop. I tried to wipe it first. But there was no way to format or bulk erase it. As I deleted files manually, new files were being added quicker than I could manually erase the large mass of files that had appeared and was growing. At least I felt like the situation could be recovered after I uninstalled the One Drive. The following morning when I came to work and booted the laptop, the One Drive had reinstalled itself and restored everything to where it was early the day before. So everything I had done to repair things was gone and the old poisoned data had returned.
Then I went down to the IT department and said. “You have to stop this One Drive completely. I want it uninstalled and for it to not come back ever. I need it to leave my laptop alone completely”. The IT guy said “well you’re at risk of losing data that way. You really should keep the One Drive”. I replied “look, you guys might have already cost me the loss of weeks of data. If I can’t fix this, I am going to tell my Division Vice President that he can’t have any of my work going back several weeks, and that it’s your fault”. The guy reluctantly agreed and permanently disabled everything involving the One Drive.
It took me two days to get my data back by opening each file, examining the contents, and then putting it where it belonged, manually. I had to submit a service ticket to get them to erase the One Drive cloud space (poisoned data) for mein case it ever returned. They tried to stop me at every step, warning me that I might lose my data. I won’t allow that program on my personally owned PC’s, ever. I back things up on my own manually, often enough that I can’t ever lose much data. But when I back it up, it goes to where I want it to go, not in to an illegitimate space that I have no control over and then pretend on the laptop that my folders have data in them when they don’t, and then destroying how I manage them. That One Drive is a nightmare.
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Just use librem, or some other and execute some PDF so its not important.
But yes we have to force this done (backdoor in office to have some change offered in time, if needed.