Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate’s Required Data Notice

Version 4.70 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released this week, brought an unexpected change to the Required Data Notice dialog.

I originally wrote about how to disable this dialog back in July 2019.

• Disabling Microsoft AutoUpdate’s new Required Data Notice in managed environments

This week’s change caught many MacAdmins by surprise but thankfully the cause and solution were quickly found by collaboration in Slack.

Read on for the details and solution…

Solution

In August 2019 I included an update on my post about a newly discovered value for the key that controls this dialog. It turns out this alternative value is causing the problem in MAU 4.70.

In addition to the RequiredDataOnly string we knew about, the alternative option for the AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy key is RequiredAndOptionalData. The differences between Required and Optional data for Office are outlined in this support article.

MacAdmins who were deploying the RequiredAndOptionalData value found their users were seeing the Required Data Notice dialog over and over, even after acknowledging it. Those who were deploying the RequiredDataOnly value did not have this problem.

This was quickly tested and confirmed that the expected behavior can be restored by simply switching to the RequiredDataOnly value for the AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy key.

Thank you to everyone who shared their experiences in the MacAdmins Slack and worked to find the resolution!

Why does this value cause the problem

It appears that MAU is no longer recognizing the RequiredAndOptionalData value and is now only recognizing RequiredDataOnly.

When an end user sees the Required Data Notice and acknowledges it, MAU will write RequiredDataOnly to disk. However the config profile setting RequiredAndOptionalData would override it each launch and since MAU doesn’t recognize that value, triggers the dialog again.

Not the first surprise

As mentioned in my last post about MAU, Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate deferral options, Paul Bowden’s absence from Microsoft has led to a number of unwelcome changes and surprises.

I can only speculate that this is another scenario where things are falling through the cracks, likely unintentionally.

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April 18, 2024 update: The release notes for MAU confirm this change.

AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy now only accepts RequiredDataOnly. MAU has always only reported required data only.

It is obvious however that someone at Microsoft didn’t consider the downstream impact this change would cause.