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Microsoft defuses employee monitoring via Office

2020-12-03T02:50:43.879Z


After strong criticism, Microsoft does not want to make it possible to evaluate the productivity of individual employees using software. In the background, however, the company is apparently continuing to research such possibilities.


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Teamwork: Microsoft wants to measure how well companies use its software

Photo: AndreyPopov / imago images / Panthermedia

When Microsoft presented the new Office tool Productivity Score last week, the company was apparently exposed to unexpectedly violent criticism.

Unions, privacy advocates and lawyers were appalled by the possibilities the new tool was supposed to offer.

Among other things, Jared Spataro, who is responsible for Microsoft 365 and thus Microsoft's Office programs, showed in a video how the tool can be used to identify those employees who rely particularly heavily on digital communication.

The other way round would of course also be possible.

The statistics tool shows, among other things, when and how many e-mails the employees sent on which days of the past month with Outlook and how long and often they talked or chatted with each other via teams.

Experts asked by SPIEGEL advised against using this type of employee control in Germany.

Such criticism has apparently reached Microsoft.

On Tuesday, Jared Spataro explained in a blog post how to change the tool now "to protect individual privacy."

This primarily means that user names should be completely removed from the software.

It should no longer be possible to display the usage behavior of individual users.

No collection of individual data

Data on the use of online meetings, communication options, data exchange among each other and online collaboration and the like should now only be collected at company level.

"Nobody in the organization will be able to use the productivity value to access data about how an individual user uses applications and services in Microsoft 365," assures Spataro.

In addition, they want to change the user interface in such a way that it better reflects that the productivity value "is a measure of how a company makes technology usable for itself - not the individual user".

There has probably been some confusion about what the productivity value is, the manager continues, explaining that the value was never intended to evaluate individual users.

Instead, it is about how well a company uses the technical possibilities.

Microsoft continues to research

The idea of ​​analyzing the behavior of individual users does not seem to have disappeared from the company's pool of ideas.

The tech blog "Geekwire" refers to patent applications recently submitted by Microsoft that describe, among other things, a system that is supposed to evaluate the quality of meetings.

This assessment should include information such as "body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day and the number of people in the meeting."

However, such a patent application does not have to become a specific product.

According to "Geekwire" there is currently no indication that Microsoft plans to ever use the technology outlined in the patent specification.

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Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2020-12-03

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