Of course they do. It’s to be expected that big tech companies use all data they can gather for training AIs, tracking users, creating psychological profiles of the users and selling data to the highest bidders.
Microsoft is also known for creating tools and products which track employees and workers and provide nice looking dashboards and statistics for the employers. And they partner up with Palantir and other companies to create even more effective surveillance solutions for companies and law enforcement to use eventually. MS is a data company since a couple of years, just like Google or Meta is. Data is very valuable.
In the case of Microsoft Office and Teams, there’s also the issue of corporate espionage. Companies from all over the world are freely giving away sensitive data about their documents, employees and projects to a US-based megacorp. There was a time in history when this would be called corporate espionage which is supposed to be bad and illegal and so on. But, since they’re all doing it voluntarily, and there’s no definite proof of MS doing anything because it’s a black box and no one except MS can inspect what they’re doing, it’s apparently “fine”. It’s like we have collectively become dangerously naive.
So yeah, it’s all “fine”. Until it isn’t. Until it is revealed one day. Then we can all be shocked and say “how could they do this, how could they violate our trust like that, their marketing slides looked so nice and the consultant was so charming and said we needn’t to worry about anything they would keep our data safe”. Well, if you trusted them in the first place, that’s your mistake. You cannot trust a company like MS, Meta, Google, TikTok, and so on with a huge track record of privacy violations. Ever. Cloud = someone else’s computer. Host your own stuff. Prefer not to use software with proven track records of privacy violations. Don’t use products or services from companies with such track records. Prefer open source over proprietary because when the code is openly auditable that’s a plus for trustworthiness, and proprietary applications usually have a bad track record of privacy violations and other anti-user features, while open source software rarely includes such things.
And it’s only going to get worse. With upcoming things like Recall, that’s almost like having a permanent camera behind you recording your screen at all times. I feel bad for all Windows users, but on the other hand, I don’t actually have to care. Keep trusting them blindly, but please don’t be surprised when it will come crashing down on you one day.
Answer is correct, I just want to clarify a bit more:
“Password protected” in your case probably just means that you have a bootloader password or a user account password. Both would not matter in this case. If you put your drive or partition anywhere else, and it’s not an encrypted partition, it can be read. Independently of user access rights. Any other OS accessing the same drive/partition can literally read everything if it’s not encrypted. Provided, of course, that there’s a file system driver available for the OS.
Windows by default doesn’t have any Linux filesystem driver installed. I’m not sure if that’s still the case when you install WSL. And there are 3rd party Linux filesystem drivers available as well.
But to protect yourself against robbery or a Windows which might in the future include a Linux filesystem driver, you should always encrypt all of your partitions. And when encrypting, use Bitlocker only for your Windows system partition, not for any data partitions, and certainly not for Linux partitions. For Linux partitons, use the integrated LUKS2. Bitlocker on Windows isn’t private encryption by the way, since a recovery key is being uploaded to MS’ servers automatically. That means MS has theoretical access, the US government has, and law enforcement has. As well as any hackers who manage to exfiltrate that key from somewhere. That’s why I’d use Bitlocker only for the C: partition, a 3rd party encryption tool like VeraCrypt for any other Windows partition, and LUKS2 for any Linux partiton.