Suppressing Microsoft AutoUpdate’s Required Data Notice screen

Suppressing Microsoft AutoUpdate’s Required Data Notice screen

As part of the latest update to Microsoft AutoUpdate app, a new screen has appeared which requires the logged-in user to click on it.

This screen is to notify users that Microsoft AutoUpdate collects diagnostic data for Microsoft and provides basic information on how to opt-out of the data collection. The overall point of the screen is to help Microsoft comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar laws.

While this screen is fairly straightforward for an individual to deal with on their own Mac, it may cause challenges for computer labs because those facilities may remove and repopulate user home folders on each login. Since the setting which records that a user has seen the notification is stored in the user’s home folder, in the ~/Library/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist file, this may result in the lab’s users seeing this notification multiple times unnecessarily. To address this, Microsoft has made suppressing this screen possible by adding the following key and value to the com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist file

• Key: AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy
• Value: RequiredDataOnly

This setting can be applied with a script or with a configuration profile. For more details, please see below the jump.