Microsoft Productivity Score
Wolfie Christl (via David Heinemeier Hansson, Hacker News):
Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.
A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool[…]
Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.
Alex Hern (via Hacker News, Slashdot):
Microsoft has apologised for enabling a feature, “productivity score”, which critics said was tantamount to workplace surveillance.
The company says it will now make changes to the service, which lets IT administrators “help their people get the most” from its products, in order to limit the amount of information about individual employees that is shared with managers.
[…]
Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely. “Going forward, the communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork and mobility measures in productivity score will only aggregate data at the organisation level – providing a clear measure of organisation-level adoption of key features,” Spataro says. “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.”
See also: Microsoft (via Jeffrey Snover).
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
Hahaha. The damage has been done. I really can't imagine that a major software vendor is soo dumb to build in this kind of surveillance in a product that is widely used in countries where surveilling employees is strictly forbidden. How stupid are they?
But hey. Yet another reason not to use Microsoft software.
[…] regards to connectivity to the security black hole, also known as Microsoft Corporation’s Office 365. Microsoft Corporation claims nothing to see […]
