Information about Copilot and data protection

All staff and students at SDU have access to Copilot Chat as part of our Microsoft agreement. Microsoft is now also starting to embed Copilot in more and more of their products. It has started in some versions of Outlook and in the new year it will also be embedded directly in Office suite products such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In the current version, Copilot Chat only has access to the working documents in the Office suite that you have open or upload to Copilot Chat. Copilot still requires the extended licence to search across your documents.

Microsoft does not train their AI based on SDU's data and SDU's agreement with Microsoft means that you can generally use Copilot to process confidential information. However, there are a few points to be aware of when using Copilot.


How to make sure your data is protected:
• Make sure you're always logged into your work account - otherwise you're not protected!

• When using Copilot Chat, always check that a small green shield icon appears in the top right corner. The shield means that you are covered by "Enterprise data protection" and thus SDU's data processing agreement with Microsoft. However, there may be a few cases where the shield does not appear inside your Office documents, but if you are logged in with your work account, you are protected.

• If the shield doesn't appear in other contexts, you're probably in an open, unprotected version of Copilot - for example, if you're using Copilot via a Bing search without being logged in with your work account. Here your data is not protected in the same way. So keep an eye on the shield when you're online and using Bing.

Web search in Copilot with the green shield - how does it work?
• When you're in a document and ask a question that Copilot determines requires information from the web, Copilot generates a short search query based on your prompt and sends it to Bing. Copilot takes the context from the document you're in and creates some customised keywords. It's not your entire prompt or document that is sent - only selected keywords, unless the question is very short - for example, "weather in Odense."

• SDU is in the process of implementing additional measures to ensure that Copilot does not take sensitive personal data out of context when it performs web searches. If you have a particularly confidential document, you should not use Copilot on the document for anything other than summarising. You should not create any queries/prompts where Copilot will need to enrich the answer with content from the web. SDU IT will provide updated information if the implementation of our measures means that you can disregard the above precautionary principle. 

There are ongoing changes in Microsoft's products and services. SDU IT keeps up to date and will notify you in the future when there are relevant new changes or initiatives. If you are unsure how to use Copilot, please contact: aihub@sdu.dk