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A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), founder of Basecamp, accused Microsoft of having launched the “surveillance system in the most invasive workplace known to date”, referring to the functionality presented by Microsoft for Microsoft 365, called “Productivity Score”.
The criticism came because this productivity measurement tool made it possible to know the employment data of people with first and last names. An employer could see how much time an employee spends sending emails or using company chat. The criticism has been huge from several fronts, namely that the feature may even be illegal in some countries. Microsoft did not respond directly to comments on the matter, but has now taken a step back from implementing the feature.
Goodbye to usernames
From Microsoft they claim to have “We have listened to the feedback and are responding today by making changes to the product to further strengthen customer privacy“We believe privacy is a human right and are deeply committed to the privacy of all people who use our products.” Regarding the specific changes to the Microsoft productivity score, the company announced the following:
- The usernames of workers using Microsoft 365 will be removed. Now, having previously announced that you could see all actions associated with a user in a 28 day period. However, Microsoft now says that in response to criticism (“last week’s comments”), it will remove the feature and, from now on, Productivity Store will only add data at the organization level, not at the user level.
A problematic fact is that data anonymizer existed, but it was disabled by default.
- Mashed potato make changes to the productivity score interface to clarify that the returned score does not match individual productivity of each person, but reflects “organizational adoption of technology”. They claim that “it was never designed to score individual users,” which they will now clarify.
Other parts of the product, they claim, do not include usernames. And they resort to the idea of change: “This change will ensure that the productivity score cannot be used to track individual employees.” We will have to wait and see how things stand. The changes mentioned they fit into what Microsoft has been asked and the company it is lately, compared to what its critics say it was before.
More information | Microsoft
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