"criticized as workplace surveillance" makes it sound like it's a matter of subjective option whether or not it really is. It is workplace surveillance objectively, not merely something that can be construed as such in order to criticize. This headline should read "Microsoft apologizes for workplace surveillance feature" (though as someone else pointed out, they didn't actually apologize either).
Additionally frustrating is that the article takes unquestioningly Microsoft's premise that these metrics have value:
> But that information could also be seen on a user-by-user basis, potentially allowing managers to identify individual employees who weren’t contributing enough
A good manager should identify employees who aren't contributing enough and work with them to understand how to empower them to contribute more. But the way to gauge this is by actually looking at the work they produce; snooping on their computer usage is a poor substitute used by poor managers.
I really like how Slack states all this in their analytics. They give you just enough data to satisfy your craving for making sure people are using the app, and then they mention "message count has no relevance to actual productivity".
They definitely stay hard in the platform category.
Agreed. Not to mention that little green dot acting as a de-facto surveillance tool itself. (I've always wanted to build a Slack green-dot-activator tool that activates the green dot based on customizable settings)
I had a job once where the person tasked with training me would only do so over Slack, even though they sat 3 feet in front of me. If I spoke up to ask a question, they would angrily turn around and tell me to message them instead.
What is the objective bright line between reasonable observation of an employee and "workplace surveillance"?
Is it "workplace surveillance" when you can view the calendar appointments of your coworkers? Or see stats about the changelists submitted, bugs resolved, etc. of each person? Or see their dot when they are viewing a document?
Maybe these Microsoft features crossed a threshold of creepiness past which the world should not go. But to act like it's a settled conversation, where right and wrong are so obvious that the issue was agreed upon long ago, does not match with reality in my opinion.
> Is it "workplace surveillance" when you can view the calendar appointments of your coworkers
This doesn't have to be so black and white. I can "view" the calendar of my coworkers. That means - I see if the time slots are taken or not. I don't have to see what the actual meetings are.
I didn't realize that Zoom Rooms in our office displayed the name of the meeting on the door outside the room. One time I jokingly named my meeting "HOG THE ROOM" until my team made fun of me.
> Is it "workplace surveillance" when you can view the calendar appointments of your coworkers?
I feel like this is fine as long as it's opt-in. I cannot imagine having to go back and fourth about calendar slots every time I have to schedule a meeting, and this feature saves so much time.
> Or see stats about the changelists submitted, bugs resolved, etc. of each person?
I'm a bit ambivalent about these metrics. At least they are somewhat related to work results, rather than "how busy are you" metrics like those rolled back by MS. It's also just a visualization of data which is already publicly available in the git history.
> Or see their dot when they are viewing a document?
This one I think is a bit different. In a world with remote collaborative editing, I think this gives you more visibility about who might be looking over your shoulder while you are working rather than being a form of surveillance.
>> Or see their dot when they are viewing a document?
> This one I think is a bit different. In a world with remote collaborative editing, I think this gives you more visibility about who might be looking over your shoulder while you are working rather than being a form of surveillance.
It's two sides of the same coin isn't it? Depending on the feature is used makes it creepy, but the feature itself isn't necessary creepy.
No it's categorically different. The dot example lets me know when my manager is looking at what I'm doing. That's a feature which adds bilateral transparency about who can see what.
The MS Office features which are relevant to the article let my manager see what I am doing without my knowledge. The fact that someone can watch you without your knowledge is what makes it creepy.
But I think that pedantic point hints at something that creates this problem: most jobs have a degree of performance to them (i.e. act out the part). Which is perhaps why improv gets recommended for workgroup development every second Sunday.
I think the point is, if your version of "work" is focusing on the metrics, and climbing your way to the top rather than real work output, you would be happy to have more metrics which are orthogonal to real work
I think, in general, the line should be between any metrics the employee is aware they're being judged on vs. ones they're not. Don't collect data on how many OneDrive files I've shared if that's not a metric that's part of the value I provide to the company.
How do you define that? I ask because I am guessing people who are angered by this have no idea what data employers can already access. Have you seen the data that most MDM or network monitoring software can provide about employees? That is much more sensitive data than what Microsoft is reporting and I haven't seen anyone really object to it in large numbers. The Microsoft stuff seemed intrusive and wrong headed, but odds are if your employer wanted to use that they are also using some much worse stuff too. I might even consider the Microsoft tools helpful as a canary in a coalmine for other bad practices that are much harder to see.
I think the idea with the MS tool is that a nontechnical manager can see these scores and potentially have bias or take action based on how “productive” people are when these metrics are really meaningless for most (except maybe customer service people, but they will already be measured with different tools.) the network and mdm teams’ surveillance is more deep and sensitive, but it’s not likely to be accessible directly to your supervisors.
Whether or not employers already have other workplace surveillance tools has absolutely no bearing on the fact this Microsoft "feature" is, in fact, a workplace surveillance tool
>I haven't seen anyone really object to it in large numbers.
Again, whether or not people have complained about the other, existing workplace surveillance tools has absolutely no bearing the accurate description of Microsoft's new "feature" as a workplace surveillance tool.
>The Microsoft stuff seemed intrusive and wrong headed, but odds are if your employer wanted to use that they are also using some much worse stuff too.
Your employer's access to other, potentially more intrusive, surveillance tools also has no bearing on Microsoft's indisputable status as a surveillance tool.
>I might even consider the Microsoft tools helpful as a canary in a coalmine for other bad practices that are much harder to see.
This canary would already be dead if your previous statement about your employer's propensity to use other, more intrusive, surveillance tools is accurate. But in any event, even if Microsoft's new surveillance tool somehow benefited you by better informing you of your employer's devious intent, it still remains a surveillance tool, and should be accurately described as such.
> Have you seen the data that most MDM or network monitoring software can provide about employees?
No. I have not, not really. I would like to understand more about this, however.
I've asked about this but the "stock answer" is always along the lines of "The company owns the equipment, therefore they can do anything they want."
That stock answer leaves out a WHOLE LOT OF DETAIL about exactly what info is collected, how it's processed and some guidance about what's "normal" vs "extraordinary". Presumably it's possible for them to do "a lot", but no one who really knows is willing to explain this in a way that's useful. This would make a very interesting essay or in-depth investigative journalism article, I just don't understand why no one has done that, all writing about this just seems to boil down to the very boring "the computer equipment belongs to your employer" analysis.
I suspect that the vast majority of organizations do very little with this kind of surveillance power, but then, there's no way I can really know because either people stay silent about it or they have no idea.
I have not used any MDM software in years, but I have used ones that can see your location, apps installed, and other basic information like that. They also generally have ways to control your phone such as the ability to lock down or completely wipe your phone. I have heard there are more advanced MDMs that can get more detailed information such as contacts and usage information about messages, but I think it is still impossible to get the messages themselves.
I have also had to install MDM software in the past at companies with BYOD policies in order to get access to company email or corporate networks so the "they own the device" answer isn't always valid.
Good for Business, Mobile Iron, etc are commonly deployed on personal cellphones with little regard for the fact that these devices and the associated cell service is not paid for by the employer in any way.
Pretty crummy for employees who can have their data wiped at any time by a petty employer.
macOS MDM on it's own is fairly okay. There is an AccessRights bit that can be loaded with the enrollment profile to allow or disallow certain actions. Certainly the protocol can be ab/used to silently install other software: endpoint detection tooling, scripts, etc. and to suppress protections normally built-in to the OS that would normally gate background usage of apps that crawl certain file paths, etc. So on it's own, no issues. Combined with 3rd party tooling, poorly written scripts, etc. dangerous.
That is classic whataboutism, just like Pointing out the China or North Korea have worse human rights abuse in no way justifies some other nation for abusing peoples rights
Simply because companies have other tools for which to spy on their employees does not justify Microsoft adding one more
This is not whataboutism because the guilty parties are the same. I'm not saying don't worry about draconian drug laws in the US because China and North Korea are running concentration camps. I am asking why should we focus on Chinese and North Korean drug laws when they are already running concentration camps. The most severe problems deserve the most attention.
>Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.
I am not trying to counter an argument by pointing out hypocrisy. I am simply stating there are bigger fish to fry. Maybe you object to that argument, but it wasn't whataboutism.
There should be a new Law as a sibling to Godwin's Law: any time someone starts throwing out quotes from Wikipedia or, worse, comments that consist solely of a link to a Wikipedia page, constructive discussion is over.
Nothing against the parent post; I see it all the time. You just were an handy target. :)
I don't know how my comment killed a constructive debate rather than the comment that labeled my initial post "whataboutism" when it is something that objectively does not meet the traditional definition. I really don't know how I am supposed to constructively dispute that without pulling in the actual definition from somewhere like Wikipedia.
It's a news article. They're reporting what happened. What happened was people criticised the feature as workplace surveillance. That's an objective fact.
Whether or not it is workplace surveillance is an opinion, not an objective fact. So they report the fact that someone had that opinion, not that it is fact.
It's a good thing - it's good journalism to do this.
This one isn't the worst I've seen, but I do get tired of supposed journalists who feel their job is to just spread the advertising/press releases of powerful people. Real journalism should be helping the reader by adding context. Has something like this happened before? How many people has this impacted? Do they have a history of making these kinds of apologies and then sneaking in the problematic feature bit by bit over time? Maybe point out the persuasion technique being used by MSFT PR in the language they chose to talk about this issue.
I am conflicted about this one. It is possible to think of situations where reporting two opposing opinions as equally valid is not neutral but instead legitimizes an extremist opinion. Overall it is easier for the journalism medium, since it does not annoy any advertisers; and it has this objective air. I am not sure if there is a better solution.
I think it might be done to more of an extreme in the UK than people are used to elsewhere.
For example the BBC will report a headline like <Man "walks on moon">, and some people react to that like 'why is it in quotes are they saying they don't believe it?' What they're doing is reporting that they have been told by a source that a man walked on the moon. The source may be the President of the United States, but they're still reporting what the source told them, because they weren't there they don't know they didn't see it with their own eyes. They just know what they were told and so they quote that.
It's a principle, and sometimes principles look funny but the point is you always do it... on principle.
Totally agree with the example you give, with quotes.
My comment was directed more towards news where they would report, following your example, <Group a says "man walked on the moon", group b says "nobody was ever in the moon">.
When it is reported in this way it feels a bit lazy, under the pretense of reporting on the "facts" ("Somebody said something" is a fact too, but were we on the moon or not?)
I guess all I am saying is sometimes reporting from the perspective of "there are two sides" (for every issue) is not neutral. It is an instance of False dichotomy, and removes all nuance on the debate (only options pro or against)
No, the idea that everything is an "opinion" is dangerous. This feature was workplace surveillance. Donald Trump lied about winning the election, he did not "make misleading statements" or the other weasel words I've seen some newspapers use. That VC on Twitter is "rich," not "privileged" or "fortunate."
Is the surveillance part the problem or the scoring of productivity? I am pretty sure most employers have the ability to log information like what was mentioned here. It's just that they don't use it for measuring productivity due to the obvious flaw that it can be hacked if employees know about it. Most companies use this type of information only when the employee is suspect of leaks or misconduct eg Google has used logged data as evidence against Anthony Levandowski of the data he transferred. Slack gives administrators most of the data for the type it was mentioned in the article.
Are you sure that your employer hasn't installed any custom software/antivirus in your work device? Likely they have.
I’m absolutely sure. This practice is illegal in the EU. You can’t log stuff unless you get explicit permission from the employee, listing the exact metrics and purposes of the data logged (also things like where and how long it will be stored).
It’s baffling that Microsoft thought this was a good idea in the first place.
> It's just that they don't use it for measuring productivity due to the obvious flaw that it can be hacked if employees know about it.
I would think the bigger issue is that there isn't any basis to say that the metrics collected are a realistic capture of productivity. Measuring stuff and understanding measurements is hard, and you don't want to make big and consequential decisions on a bullshit number.
" Productivity Score is designed to help IT administrators measure and manage adoption so their people can get the most out of Microsoft 365. We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard over the last few days and are moving quickly to respond by removing user names entirely from the product. This change will ensure that Productivity Score can’t be used to monitor individual employees. " Seems like exactly what everyone wanted. Great response.
I think it's quite a stretch to consider this a "great" response. MS got caught treating user privacy in a particularly abysmal way, but it's 100% in line with their general approach to user data. The main difference here is the revelation that they're sharing your personal data with your employer rather than keeping it to themselves. Sure they rolled back their intrusive practice when they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, but this gives me zero confidence that they are treating my privacy with respect in any other case.
I guess a problem is that some smaller offices use O365 and simple deduction could link the person back to the data O365 spits out. They should make the feature unavailable unless you have a certain amount of seats.
Yeah this is a major question. For instance, under GDPR rules, most restrictions relate to "personally identifiable information", which is defined as not only data which specifically identifies an individual, but any data which can be used to identify an individual. So for instance if you collect detailed information about usage patterns which includes country of origin, and you have exactly one user in Sudan, data privacy rules would apply because you would know exactly which user the data is referring to.
I actually wonder how this product would have passed GDPR at all.
The GDPR doesn’t say you can’t know anything about anyone; “all” it says is that you tell people what data you collect and why, and delete it when you don’t need it.
As long as you’ve told your user in Sudan that country of origin is something you collect for marketing decisions, it’s fine.
That's not entirely correct. So for example, let's say I ask users about users' name and address, and I ask their permission to store this under GDPR. In a separate table, I store "anonymous" sensitive data, like which how many users in each country have a particular health issue, but it's "anonymous" so I never asked the user's permission to collect it. I am violating GDPR, because I can use my demographic data to identify some specific users who have some specific health conditions, and I never asked permission to do that.
> I don't see the word "sorry" or "apologize" anywhere in there.
Good. Apologies have become so watered down as to be meaningless. Just fix the problem, tell us how the problem was fixed, and move on. Looks like that's what they did. Good on them.
Disagree. The lack of any real contrition — let alone accountability for those responsible — makes me suspect that they consider this a PR blunder, not an ethics blunder. They'll readily build something similar in the future if they think they can get away with it.
On the other hand, what does "real contrition" even mean for a corporation?
A corporation isn't a person. Decisions are made by 100's or 1,000's of individual managers, each of whom join and leave over the years. CEO's enter and leave. Board membership changes.
Accountability comes from people not buying a product. Or from a government fining them $$$$.
I'd ask you, why do you think a voluntary statement of "contrition" from one of a corporation's single employees means anything at all?
(I'm playing a little bit devil's advocate here, but I think it's worth remembering that corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such.)
And if there was, the criticism would be that a fall guy took the blame.
Failures shouldn’t lead to people falling on their swords to please the public. When you make that the response, people don’t learn to not make mistakes, they learn to hide them, deny them, and shift blame.
This wasn’t a “mistake”, like pushing a bug to production. It was intentional. Product managers drew up a spec for the feature. Designers designed it. Engineers built it. Technical writers wrote documentation for it. Marketers promoted it. In all likelihood, the VP writing the statement knew about it as well. Plenty of people had meetings and thought about and discussed exactly what the feature was going to do.
The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure. For whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Microsoft can’t fix that by making small changes to what they’ve already built to appease the public. They have to change the organization so that it doesn’t happen again.
"The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure."
As much as I despise Microsoft, this is more of an industry and even a societal failure.
Taking a look at the exploitative, surveillance society we've built, it's clear that ethics are just not very important in tech, nor in business as a whole.
Many of HN's readers who are now wagging their fingers at MS are probably working at companies that also spy on their users, and they either look the other way as long as they get a nice fat paycheck, don't think about it at all, or excuse it in some way.
Privacy-violating sites and software don't build themselves, and there's no shortage of them in today's internet.
None of that matters either. We need a national privacy law.
Microsoft knows social media and readers of the Guardian are not going to be a buyer of Office surveillance and metrics software. So it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t apologize - ie, it doesn’t matter if they delegate out customer service for non paying end users to social media. This is different than say Facebook and Google, where they need more people who click on ads and convert, which is a form of payer, so they’re going to be more sensitive to user perceptions despite the absence of a national privacy policy. It’s the #1 misconception, that there is a regulatory failure around social media privacy, when really it’s everything else where there’s no meaningful market mechanism to “opt out” of eg your employer’s privacy violating surveillance.
So to be really precise, the best way to get a remedy for non-paying poor people from a giant company is consistently, always, the law. It’s not a fucking post mortem scrum.
Who's going to benefit from the privacy law and who's going to sponsor it? Trillion dollar empires are built on surveillance and we'd need another Lincoln to stop them.
I find this to be quite a stretch. A company with an atrocious record on privacy got caught violating user's privacy in an atrocious way, and they backed off amid widespread controversy. MS calculated that the cost of the bad product image outweighed the benefit of selling your data to your employer. I have no reason to believe this is going to improve their handling of data privacy in the future.
The issue here is the misleading headline. Instead of, "Microsoft apologises for feature criticised as workplace surveillance", the headline should read something like, "Microsoft changes workplace surveillance software after outcry".
It matters to know if it was seen as an issue in the first place or not.
That’s the difference between moving a feature to some other random place and let people assume it disappeared, and removing a feature completely on ethical grounds.
An apology from a publicly traded capitalist corporation can never hold any meaning anyway. Literally everything they do is designed to maximize profit at the expense of anything else. If Microsoft had a magic box with a button on it that said "If you press this, ten million innocent people will die, but nobody will ever find out and the company will make a dollar for every one" they would have a legal obligation to their shareholders to press it.
A corporation can't do something, people do things. Nobody at Microsoft cares they put out surveillance software, they just estimated their was enough outrage that pulling it was more profitable than leaving it out.
The "legal obligation" is fictive, but corporations infamously do these things.
E.g. Ralph Nader:
> Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is a landmark non-fiction book by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, first published in 1965. Its central theme charged car manufacturers of resistance to the introduction of safety features (such as seat belts), and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety.
> In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. It "(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, 'questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits'; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a 'continuing' and harassing investigation of him."[12]
> On March 22, 1966, GM President James Roche was forced to appear before a United States Senate subcommittee and apologized to Nader for the company's campaign of harassment and intimidation. Nader sued GM in November 1966 for invasion of privacy.[12][10] He won the case on appeal in January 1970 and was awarded $425,000, which he used to establish the Center for Auto Safety, a non-profit advocacy group. He went on to lobby for consumer rights, helping drive the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act, among others.[13]
Yes it may not be a legal obligation, but there's probably no better way to dependably predict corporate behavior than to consider profit motive/investor ROI.
Am I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft?
> Am I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft?
I would be highly surprised if there weren't. However, it'd far worse if Microsoft provided such features, because that would mean there'd be much less friction for an enterprise to adopt them (since pretty much all of then already license Office). At least with those other suppliers, a company would have to have decided it wanted worker surveillance and seek it out, rather than getting it out-of-the-box by default.
I’ve worked at a workplace before that had one of these software packages. It had a taskbar icon so everyone knew it was there. Still a bad show installing it, but at least less subtle than Microsoft’s efforts.
Nope. My work hasn't ever mentioned explicitly that they monitor us but they're also tracking productivity somehow. Interestingly, they had to tell people to stop working so much once we transitioned to work-from-home. They found that people were working way longer hours and not taking lunches.
The difference is in the transparency and purpose of the metrics. Salesforce’s entire purpose is to measure and publicize performance metrics across the business, down to the individual.
In Sales, this means meetings, calls, deals, etc. In Service, this means satisfaction scores, handle times, etc.
All of those are well understood employee productivity scores.
I think this scares people because no one is sure how it’ll be measured and used. At first blush, it just looks like a proxy for identifying luddites and/or people who hate chat — regardless of their actual job performance.
Jared Spataro, the corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said in a statement. “We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we’re deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products.”
You don't get to be a "Corporate VP" in a Fortune 1000 without either being a True Believer, or being so comfortable with toeing the party line that you don't even notice the hypocrisy any more.
“My team and I have therefore voluntarily surrendered to the Peacekeeping Force at The Hague, Netherlands, and we welcome the investigation and verdict of the UN Committee on Human Rights”.
Just wait for it to come back with less fanfare - removing usernames from a 10 person company isnt really anonymizing anything - which everyone working for a small company giving "anonymous feedback" knows.
Absolutely. This is not a feature which any employee ever wished to have. This is aimed 100% at managers and people who decide on which products the company should buy and no better way to persuade them by giving them a surveillance tool on their employees. It will come back in pieces.
Yeah, you're kidding yourself if you think that this level of surveillance is possible, but that they won't implement it due to negative feedback or any other kind of pressure. If this can be done, it will be done, and nothing will get in its way.
At this point, we might all be better off adopting the attitude: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have outrun the other guy. I don't like it either, but I don't see much of an alternative.
We probably have to acknowledge that if you are using Windows at all, MS probably has this kind of detailed data about everything you do on your computer.
This has been possible for a long time, the only boundary which was being tested here was the idea of selling this data to your employer.
Simply having this surveillance tool come out the door shows that there is little or no consideration for people's privacy during the planning and development process.
It allows Microsoft to up-sell. "Your users aren't using X, you should encourage them to do so," "Look, your users are using X, you should purchase Y!" "Your users aren't using Y..."
Any decent manager shouldn't care but you can easily automate a python script to do some non consequential key presses every few minutes.
I actually did that at a previous job where I had to use windows 10 and (I think) the sys admin policy was to 'lock screen' after 20 min of inactivity, so I eventually got fed up of having to login all the time.
Look into AutoHotkey if you're on Windows. It's a nice automation tool, particularly shining for anything input-related. You should be able to whip up a script that moves your mouse around on idle quite easily.
I remember using python at the time because I wasn't given admin rights on those machines (contractor) but they had python 3 already installed, it was just the quickest to do the job without admin escalation.
Just to clarify you can definitely also do mouse moves with python and ctypes.
I don't think it's that simple. From my experience, if you are in certain non-Microsoft applications and the mouse is moving it will still set you as Away and won't set your status to Available until you click into an application it recognizes.
> I don't think it's that simple. From my experience, if you are in certain non-Microsoft applications and the mouse is moving it will still set you as Away and won't set your status to Available until you click into an application it recognizes.
Is it just ignoring mouse movement, or actually monitoring interaction with the app it recognizes?
I'm no netsec expert but this type of programable usb devices sounds like a security risk specially on a company machine with access to an internal network.
Reminds me of a story I read - some company had a batch job that ran for hours and for some reason if the computer went to screen saver, the batch job crashed and had to be restarted. Rather than actually find the root of the problem (of course), or disable screensaver (not allowed per security policy), they just assigned somebody to move the mouse every few minutes to keep the screensaver from activating.
So one day, the guy brings in a vibrating baby bouncer, puts the mouse in the baby bouncer, and kicks back for the rest of the day.
Both of the solution seems dumb to me. Can't you play a 24 hour video? AFAIK most media players prevent the computer from going to sleep. Or even better write a program that does it for you: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34836406/how-to-prevent-...
> “No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.”
Seems like the number of jobs where your effectiveness can be measured by how much time you spend in Microsoft 365 is fairly small. The number where there isn't a better metric available is likely even smaller. If you are a transcriptionist, output is nicely metered—many get paid by the word. Even most admin assistants have so much phone work and other jobs where time in O365 is only a fraction of their job.
I think this is mostly a big todo about nothing. Any manager who uses something as basic as this as a metric is almost certainly worthless regardless.
I think people's apprehension over this kind of metric is entirely justified. As you say, it's not a good measure of almost anything. But that doesn't mean an employer can't treat it as a valid metric, and use it as a justification to remove or punish employees they don't like.
It's good that Microsoft is removing this, but I'm skeptical it will make any difference in the end. Absent this, a shitty boss is going to use some other, equally pointless metric.
Didn't Google pull a move like this on Project Dragonfly - publicly state that they were dropping the project after outrage, and then quietly continue developing it in secret? I am extremely skeptical that Microsoft will simply shelve the user-specific monitoring feature. In fact, I outright don't believe them.
> I am extremely skeptical that Microsoft will simply shelve
If it makes money (directly or indirectly) or can be used to power a (feature/data/etc) moat of some kind you can absolutely bet it will return: it's been implemented now, and capitalism means that profit-motives ensure there's always pressure to bring it back, and if it's just some PR manoeuvring and the flick of a switch to re-enable it, it just becomes a case of "when" and not "if".
(disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, but entirely unrelated to the team that built this.)
The privacy ramifications are intense. As the youth is apt to say, "like woah".
That said, I would love to see a tool that gives work-day insight where the user entirely owns and controls the data.
I've found it helpful to have a summarized report on how much of my work day is spent in meetings and emails verses writing code. It helps me to have data, rather than a vague feeling as to how much time I'm spending on things and how I could optimize my time.
I have no desire for HR or my management to see that information and I fully see where others having that data is ripe for abuse, but for my own sake if I totally control the data, it's useful.
“No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.”
How cute :) Organization don't get it. Microsoft get it all for itself :> More data for the ads ! And not only that.
All that experience or even code done by MS for China scoring system must be enforced on the rest of Earth population !
Not to mention typical metrics stupidity: lines of code, keypresses, count of videocalls ?
Such thing is just proof to not use that online-desktop apps. Or straight outlaw them.
But managers will love it ! Just today news: Google spies on emploeyes before firing them - no more "spying" necessary, everything will be in the "data" ! :>
This form of surveillance is out of the bag now. The burden now is on us as employees to say no, to insist that our contracts explicitly prohibit being surveilled.
> Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely
> The company is also changing its branding around the feature to make clear that the “productivity” that is being scored is that of organisations, not individuals
OK, I was wrong when I wrote my prediction that the only thing they are going to do is to change the name of the feature (made in the previous comment in my comment history).
> Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely. [...] “No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.”
I'm impressed with their response to this. The promptness and decisiveness suggests the issue was something which fell through the gaps rather than an intentional strategy.
It sometimes feels like we are headed for tech-based dystopia. I just hope there are enough employers out there that will say, "we don't spy on employees" so people like me will stay employable. Thank you Red Hat for being awesome about that (I work for Red Hat and love their approach).
If Jeffrey Snover says they made a "screw up," the actual question to answer is how did this get approved in the first place? Thankfully we have privacy activists looking at these shady products.
Who are Microsoft competing with to add this feature? Have they decided that Apple has control of the privacy hill and they’re going to get as far away from it as possible?
Aggregate data can still provide rough ideas for individuals in small organizations. Splitting up a deployment within a single larger organization can yield similar insights.
“ Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely.” - only to be added back in as a “premium” feature.
I can understand if people got upset.
As a tech guy it’s hard to take those metrics as anything but a joke though.
The less I’m forced to use a microsoft product at work the more I’ll produce.
Offtopic: since theguardian.com kicked out Suzanne Moore in a rather unfriendly way, I don't read this newspaper any more (at least for some time), also no further (small) donations.
Basically metrics about how much time you are spending on Office 365 products, as well as metrics about how much certain features are being used (like @mentions in emails)
Maybe Microsoft can actually use the data to create a feature to show if an employee is overworked or burnt out. That would be some good use of that tool.
Yeah exactly. How long before this goes into a predictive model where employers can identify which employees are likely to start producing less in the near future?
