To support the responsible use of AI, we are disabling Web Search in Microsoft 365 Copilot effective July 1, 2025.
This change helps create a safe and secure space for the WCM community to use Copilot with confidence — including for work involving moderate to high risk data, such as protected health information (PHI) and student records. Disabling Web Search ensures that Copilot operates solely within our secure Microsoft 365 environment, helping us maintain compliance with HIPAA and FERPA regulations.
Review Policy 500.03 (Data Classification) for how institutional data should be categorized and protected based on its sensitivity.
Ensuring data are protected
When this change is made, you must be logged into your WCM Copilot account with your CWID to ensure sensitive data are protected. Any data submitted in personal or consumer versions of Copilot are not protected. Please do not submit any PHI or student-related data in your WCM Copilot account until July 1, 2025.
Visit copilot.microsoft.com and log in with your WCM email address, or select “Work” if you’re already signed into your M365 account:
You can confirm you are logged into our protected version of Copilot by looking for the shield icon at the top of your screen and hovering over it to verify enterprise data protections have been enabled:
What to expect
To secure WCM’s supported version of Copilot for moderate and high-risk data, ITS will turn off Copilot’s Web Search feature, which uses Bing to retrieve up-to-date information. All responses will be generated using the internal Large Language Model (LLM) without fetching external web content, reducing exposure to external data handling practices.
As of this notice, Copilot’s last major knowledge update was in October 2023. Without Web Search, prompts that rely on real-time or web-based information will likely yield inaccurate or outdated results. Examples:
- What are the current NIH grant deadlines?
- Summarize the latest research on Alzheimer’s published in the last month.
- What’s the weather in New York today?
Prompts that rely on general knowledge, reasoning, or user-provided context should continue to yield good results. Examples:
- Summarize the attached document.
- Explain the difference between HIPAA and FERPA.
- Draft an email to a colleague summarizing our research aims.
As with any AI tool, we caution you that responses from Copilot may not always be accurate, so please double check information and be aware of underlying biases in these tools. If you have any questions about Copilot, please contact copilot-feedback@med.cornell.edu or visit the ITS AI webpage.