I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it.
I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then immediately removed it from my login items before the call even started. But after the call, there it was again in my login items.
I have never seen an application behave this way that was not widely considered to be malware.
Maybe it's possible to restrict its access via flatpak or Snap? I have a messenger via flatpak that can't access anything outside the home/Downloads folder, but I can't say whether that restriction applies to other apps as well.
Maybe some day people will understand that this "walled garden" is a good thing
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
So I had a vague memory: go to your account icon > Settings > Auto-start application, and uncheck it.
How silly that people who don't have accounts — because they use Teams infrequently — are subjected to the spammiest behavior.
I can't recall exactly what I did, it was a while back.
I think one way to combat things like this is to find the launch file disable it and make it unwritable.
chflags +simmutable <launchfile>
I had a couple of interviews with a bank and they wanted me to use Teams. I fell through the trap of installing it. Then (by default) plugged itself on my start-up list. "Join by browser" is the best option.
As or the tool, I use from SysInternals the Autoruns.exe. I love this toolkit (for a couple of decades now), I always suggest people to download the SysInternals Suite, cool small exe tools.
Edit: adding the download site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...
Honestly, it's frustrating that installing a daemon doesn't require user consent. Apple doesn't have their priorities right — instead of this legitimately useful feature, they added these annoying runtime permissions for the subdirectories in your home directory.
I like the idea of running apps in their own sandbox, eg using docker container to run an instance.
For macOS, maybe second desktop login just for Teams and then use quick user switching.
Kludge, not a fix.
Working remotely, my SO has to agitate the mouse, like a dead person's switch, to prevent screensaver / lock screen, and to signal to micromanaging PHB continuous attention. Separate user login wouldn't help with that.
In your Teams profile settings, have you also unchecked Settings > General > Auto-start application?
(I'm not saying that Teams shouldn't use "Login Items" as the source of truth on this, just that Microsoft provides its own setting for this.)
I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea".
Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list of things I detest about Teams.
You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well.
Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer.
On top of that, it doesn't even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop/web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can't even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video.
Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison.
The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft's services is convenient. It's nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling/joining/managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing.
Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio/video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype.
All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom.
I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn't seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don't even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.
The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist.
All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination.
A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary <32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn't perfect but everything about it was in some ways sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead.
The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it.
Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison.
This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.
Who can I throw money at to help make this happen? (Even one that only supported plain text chats and presence would be worth a lot, just so I don't have to have the whole beast running unless I'm actually in a video meeting)
Teams uses (or at least used) Skype for business' core under the hood
I regularly get messages come through to Skype mobile but not desktop even when I'm working on my desktop, the mobile app seems to need to crash and restart frequently, it's slow and unreliable responding to incoming calls which often get dropped, when they come to the app at all. Having said that now my organisation has decided to move decisively to teams, it's suddenly becoming unreliable. Maybe having trouble coping with increased usage. Maybe that was the problem with Skype too.
At least the feature request has 2900 upvotes.
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
Oh pssht, humans can't notice a response time of less than 2 seconds. Plus performance doesn't matter at all because you can add it later if you need it, which you don't. Anyway, you can't say it's slow until you've measured it and you can't complain until you have a fix. Besides, it's more important that the code is readable because it will be read much more often than it will be written. And furthermore, if you re-run the same thing a few times to warm the JIT up, discount startup time, ignore input and output time and network lag because they are external to the system and only measure the core function runtime, you'll find it's ackshually really fast (if you buy new hardware which is ifine because +$2000 computer spend is cheaper than developer time). And does a few seconds really matter, what were you going to do with that 10 seconds of response time, read a book or something? Slow? What do you mean "slow", launch time, hover response, switching response, time to finish redrawing a page? There's many things happening and you can't complain unless you narrow down exactly which specific sub-millisecond behaviour is taking too long for you - none of them? thought not.
Stop questioning the dogma, hush.
When I open up teams, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to.
When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess?
Instead of Discord were you can see all of your servers, Slack separates this all out that makes the entire user experience (at least for me) completely abysmal.
Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.
To sum up my 2 cents:
Teams is about the same as Zoom with some text-based chat functionality thrown in and some neat Outlook calendar integration.
Slack is just Discord that is way, way worse.
Comparing the two doesn't even make sense, but at least Teams does better in it's respective category.
Slack I have one account and it logs in through SSO. sidebar, message window, thread. It seems pretty cohesive, and mostly customizable.
Teams I have the kitchen sink navigation experience, full of dark patterns and mediocrity.
One thing I will say for teams - since they were competing with other meeting software, they did add a good direct link from calendar to teams meeting.
Video chat and calendar integration work great, though.
The way to IM individuals is cumbersome but consistent with other cumbersome Office products.
I don't like how Slack keeps only a limited list of recent chats there, the hit-miss ratio for me is terrible and I usually need to re-search for the person I want to chat with.
And that kind of thing is my run with Slack. It has answers for many UX complaints, but they are buried in settings somewhere or behind a paywall.
While I also hate the team UX, at least to me it looks pretty similar to Slack in the standard view. On my left when I start up is a list of all users. If I click one I have an IM session with that user.
There are some other "views" in Teams (Teams view, Activities view, ...) were you in one of those?
Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff.
This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe even better since at least the information is audited and not available to any random sysadmin.
This just makes me choose my employers more carefully as while they certainly have this data to abuse, fortunately few do not.
The risk of a micromanager misusing the information mentioned in this article isn’t one of privacy, but one of being a crappy manager. If someone ever remarked on the amount of screen sharing I did or did not use as if that metric mattered, it would just help me not work for them.
If someone is forced to work for someone, it’s extremely easy to game this metric and maintain privacy.
I learned decades ago to assume everything on company property is recorded and stored for ever. That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy.
If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?
You don't have privacy on company equipment.
In general, in Europe you can't contract away most of your privacy rights, so it's not even worth looking at your job contract because you signing "I allow the company to do X" does not necessarily mean that the company is allowed to do X.
Fortunately, my org doesn’t actually mitm bank sites.
I tried looking for cases where this was tried and haven’t found any. I would like to see this prosecuted as it seems wrong.
You don't want to be tracked ? use you own device and network.
The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know what.
This especially bad for the folks who aren’t able to properly put those devices in a separate subnet and protect themselves.
My home network blocks a lot of traffic, but I’d be really surprised if my personal device provided any telemetry to work.
I have a separate work computer and home computer on my desk; the work computer is on a guest wi-fi network and cannot see local traffic. A decent wi-fi router with guest network capabilities is a trivial expense these days.
It's really easy to let your work bleed into your personal machine...
You would think it would be unmanageable and you'd be right we're it not for Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy). I've got two laptops docked and connected to external monitors. Synergy lets me use just one keyboard and mouse for all three at the same time. Makes it feel like they're just three adjacent screens on one PC. But because they're not I can maintain strict separation between personal and work, and between internal/corporate and client data.
Then, like others have said, I have a fair amount of filtering on the network level.
Why not use the First party equivalent? Microsoft's Mouse Without Borders claims to do exactly this.
If they were all Windows this might be nice as it claims to support some edge cases Synergy doesn't (primarily logon/UAC).
For example, on my client/project-specific machine (where I don't have admin rights), I have a batch file (start-synergy.bat) that lives on my desktop with:
C:\Users\jdbernard\Synergy-1.12.0\synergyc.exe -name client-pc 192.168.1.120I have my router setup with port-forwarding for the Synergy protocol. Combined with stable IP addresses internally on my network and dynamic DNS pointing to my home network, I am able to use this tool even when the client machine is on VPN.
Of course, it's important to realize that by doing this you are sending keystrokes across the internet, so it's important to enable the option in Synergy to encrypt the traffic.
I have moved over though to using Barrier, a synergy-core fork. You get ssl crypto for free, and it fixes some simple but long standing bugs that really annoyed me. Have only used on Mac + Linux for now.
For even better isolation, a virtual machine could be used, instead of a second computer.
Wait, is this something that needs even saying?! Are people relly BYODing personal laptops too? Why? It would not even cross my mind to use personal computer to touch work stuff with ten foot pole.
Also tried Barrier and dedicating one monitor to work, but I still can't share/mix the audio so have 2 separate headsets.
I know ideally I'd just use the work computer all the time when "working", but they're VPN-ing all traffic and I occasionally need to read a private email, or do some browsing and would prefer they don't see that traffic.
it's a bit complex for what i need but it should work well.
Low friction answer to that is a personal smartphone. Bonus points because it works in the office too!
Why ? theoretically you have a point, but practically which company would spy on your network ? I totally understand, and agree to some degree, a company protecting its assets and tracking what their employees are doing but it's not the same as putting a general spyware.
For example if it has some device management software, or some VPN clients or whatnot installed, this increases the attack surface.
Also „leipert“-private might be boring for targeted attacks. But „leipert“-corporate might be interesting, if someone owns my private network OR my work computer, it might have an impact on the other.
This reminds me how companies used to rate the performance of programmers based on how many lines of code they produced and why so many companies eventually abandoned this model. All it did was incentivize programmers to quickly hammer out superfluous, inefficient, bug ridden code that would just bite them in the ass later rather than concentrating on writing quality code. I think that's all that would end up happening with MS Teams tracking. Once employees figure out the game, they're just going to spend as much time as they can chatting, posting messages and scheduling pointless meetings rather than doing actual work.
I think the issue with this approach, which is one that I completely agree with, applaud, and also adhere to is that many people are not as fortunate to be in such a position to turn down employment opportunities.
Those are the people who need protection from "features" such as these, because those are the people who's employers WILL take advantage of them using features.
Here's an example: "'I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots'" https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54289152
Employers are not allowed to track you in your private time, in the toilets or putting a camera under you chair, but it is perfectly fine to track your usage of the company's resources and adherence to regulations.
We software engineers are a spoiled kind of employee, but in most traditional work places your time and actions are tracked
I’m confused with this question. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like Teams has (or will have) any kind of end-to-end encryption in place. Teams is a sluggish and monstrous replacement for chat that stores all messages (on Microsoft’s servers if the organization uses Office 365) to synchronize views across devices. The easiest way to achieve such synchronization with history is to store everything on the servers. That also has the potential to make searching faster (though such a potential is squandered in Teams, in my experience).
> The Microsoft spokesperson continued: "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products. Only the global administrator has rights to the analytics and reporting experience, which provides insights into the ways in which the organization is using Microsoft Teams, not the message content itself."
IMO, this part is perfect wording in legalese. It doesn’t say that the global administrator does not have access to the message content. It says that the analytics and reporting experience (which the global administrator has access to) provides insight into how Teams is used and that this experience does not provide the message content. There must be another “experience” mode that provides access to all message content from every user in the organization’s scope. After all, every organization has its users emails available to it at any point in time in plain text form (unless the user has encrypted them with specific keys unknown to the organization). Why should chat be considered more private?
It's the entire Hacker News culture completely and wholly represented in three succinct comments.
Otherwise it’s a risk consideration like anything else... is the benefit of “knowing” what’s going on more than the liability? Usually managers in bureaucratic institutions want to know as much as they need to, but no more.
It’s also expensive and not worth it unless you’re bundling it in with M365 E1000
The perfect way to summarize the situation no matter what problem you're talking about.
Slack also allows administrators to view deleted content, etc.
Slack used to let users see who those admins were in certain places; if that's still true, then finding out who those people are may give insight into who has the ultimate form of political power.
To think that I can't have the logs of what I said is pretty incredible.
So much regression since the days Pidgin was a thing.
I think it's annoying the author chose to throw in a joke about the very point he is trying to make - that what is tracked is excessive. Or maybe this is "whoosh" over my head and I missed the point.
Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not wrong. Ever since the pandemic started, 90% of our B2B SaaS platform customers (current and prospects) have asked "do you have a Teams app". Its sudden; it was not like this a year ago. Its an "end the conversation" question for maybe half of them, similar to how not having SSO was/is an "end the conversation" issue in B2B.
Thankfully, Satya is only right in the domain of B2B. The web browser is critical software for any use-case, B2C and B2B; Teams will probably never breach B2C in a meaningful way.
Worth saying, developing apps for Teams is quite literally the most garbage-filled process we've ever been through. We've dealt with Google Play and Android, we've dealt with Apple and iOS; this is not an overstatement, Teams is a magnitude worse than both of those combined. At their core, most apps are just iframes for a website. But their reviewers actually give a shit about how your website looks. But, they give a shit in the typical Microsoft phone-it-in inconsistent half-assed way. It took us four months to get our app approved, and we're an official "Teams Partner" (whateverthehell that's worth, it means you get a contact at Microsoft who rotates every three weeks and is woefully undertrained and only capable of giving abstract, vague advice on getting through reviews). This wasn't "pandemic four months", this was "dozens of back and forths with a brick wall". We'd submit the package, they'd complain about a dozen things, we'd invest dozens of person-hours fixing half of them, dispute the other half, they'd cave, then come back with a half-dozen totally new things. Repeat. For. Four. Months. We'd model user experiences after their own apps; nope, against design guidelines. We'd build one Teams SSO flow; they'd deprecate the library. We'd make a change; their guidelines would change. It doesn't help that 80% of the devops tech they use to "help" with Teams app dev (App Studio being the big one) literally doesn't work. The VSCode plugin breaks all the time. The quality of the entire ecosystem is bad even by Microsoft standards, which are already so low they could win an olympic limbo tournament.
We finally made it through, and two of the primary engineers on the project put in their two weeks. I laughed and wished them well, and then I realized that this 1:1 with my boss that just popped up is likely him passing ownership of the project to me. At which point, I will also put in my two weeks. We have 11 engineers total; Teams single-handedly killed a quarter of our product development team. If you're ever asked to work on Teams; RUN (if you can). If you're ever asked to use Teams; RUN (if you can). It is deeply cursed; it is fundamentally, to its core, anti-user, anti-developer, and only benefits Microsoft and the so-called "Global AD Administrators". If Teams had existed in 1949, there'd be a page in the Geneva Conventions categorizing it as a Weapon of Mass Destruction and banning its use during wartime.
Imagine Microsoft being able to connect your Teams activity, Edge browser activity and Windows 10 usage to your linkedin profile, github profile (all owned MSFT properties) using a singular Microsoft account, within an enterprise. Microsoft, as a corporation, will have the ability to see the inner workings of a company and build an inter-enterprise social graph.
A very ripe target for NSA fusion technology.
But how does Microsoft reap that into something meaningful? They're not monetizing the app store (that I've seen); they're not monetizing the entire product; maybe it increases lockin, but most of these companies are so lockedin anyway they were never leaving. The argument for data sharing is interesting, but: I hate Microsoft with a feverish passion, and even I'll admit that if they were sharing/correlating significant employee data beyond the firewall of some AD/Teams/whatever instance, they'd have a lot of very angry customers on their hands. I don't see them doing that.
I'm biased, but I'm still bearish on them just because their reliable revenue centers are becoming less and less diversified. Yeah, Azure/365. What else do they have? Windows is more and more irrelevant. Browser; lost the war. Github; an expensive side-business. Xbox; a billion dollar money pit with their leaders at the top praying for Halo Infinite. Consumer hardware; nothing. Linkedin; its like Facebook, everyone hates it but everyone has one. If all of their revenue growth is in Cloud, that's still a ton of growth to reap, but I'm not sure it justifies a valuation previously assigned to the 2000s-era multi-disciplinary conglomerate Microsoft was. Amazon is fully capable of (at least) keeping pace with Azure's growth here, and they're also the biggest retailer on the planet with an unassailable operations network. I think, over the next five years, it'll be increasingly "weird" how those two companies are priced so similarly.
I started to copy chunks out of their 2020 Q1 and 2020 Q4 earnings reports, but there's too much. If you genuinely think their revenue was significantly from Internet Explorer, that nobody really uses GitHub, that Azure is a few virtual machines, and they have nothing else - you should skim read them[1][2]. Here are some excerpts:
"record Xbox Live monthly active users, console, mobile and PC. Ten years in, Minecraft is stronger than ever, with record revenue and usage". Money pit? Cash cow.
"GitHub has grown, up more than 30 percent since our acquisition a year ago. And more than 2 million organizations use GitHub" in Q1 followed by "3 million organizations using GitHub" by Q4. "The state of California is using GitHub and Azure DevOps to power 90 percent of its digital COVID-19 response infrastructure. All 5,000 engineers at Autodesk rely on GitHub to break down silos across the organization. And, at Etsy, developers are using GitHub to deploy to production more than 50 times per day", "At Ford Motor Company alone, 8,000 employees use GitHub". An "expensive side project" giving them huge growth and a foot-in, or extended lock-in, at a ton of companies.
"Azure Active Directory Premium, used by more than 100,000 organizations" in Q1 followed by "used by 200,000 organizations" by Q4.
"partnership with SAP, making Azure the preferred destination for every SAP customer." (SAP is a huge enterprise company and has 400k business customers).
"LinkedIn revenue increased 25 percent" in Q1, and by Q4 "Content shared was up nearly 50 percent year over year, and LinkedIn Live streams were up 89 percent since March. Professionals watched nearly four times the amount of LinkedIn Learning content in June than they did a year ago".
"sixty-nine organizations now have more than 100,000 users of Teams, and over 1800 organizations have more than ten thousand users of Teams."
"Power Platform already has more than 2.5 million monthly active citizen developers."; "Power Apps monthly active users increased 170 percent year over year."
"OEM Pro revenue grew 19 percent, ahead of the commercial PC market, driven by strong Windows 10 demand", "on-premises server business grew 12 percent".
"96 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Power BI to find insights in their data." up from 84% in Q1.
"our commercial cloud, which surpassed $50 billion in revenue for the first time – up 36 percent year over year"
"In June alone, 13.5 billion transactions were processed in Azure Cognitive Services. 2.5 billion messages sent. 9 million hours of speech transcribed"
"material growth in the number of $10 million plus Azure contracts" in both Q1 and Q4.
In Q4 "Commercial cloud revenue grew 30 percent. Office 365 commercial revenue grew 19 percent. LinkedIn revenue increased 10 percent. In Surface, revenue grew 28 percent. In Windows, overall OEM revenue grew 7 percent. Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 9 percent. Azure revenue grew 47 percent. Per-user business, growth continued to moderate given the size of our enterprise mobility installed base, which grew 26 percent to over 147 million seats. In Gaming, revenue increased 64 percent."
[1] https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....
[2] https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....
Interesting, because even though as a company we use teams, it's literally just a chat app for us. Most departments don't even use the "teams" part, all conversations happen 1:1 or in meetings.
I work in the IT dept, so technically we should be at the forefront of this, and yet I'm only in 2 channels and they're both silent 360 days a year. every couple months someone will ask a question in one, no one will answer and that it's until the next time.
I respect any company that runs itself with that attitude. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want to spend my days working on it.
Sorry but why is the author surprised by this? I work in corporate IT. We issue company-owned laptops / desktops / devices to employees, most of which come with Teams. Anything they do on these devices is subject to company monitoring. There is no privacy when using a company asset.
All employees signed an agreement (Technology Use Policy) about this during their onboarding.
Are companies asking employees to install Teams / other chat apps on their personal devices? Or is the author suggesting companies should not be able to view their employees conversations on an employee operated platform?
turns out if you have had a conversation with anyone on teams they will see your status (online/offline/ etc) even after you've left the chat. That works across domains too. Worse the status (online|busy|don't disturb) is visible even in Outlook.
I guess the most attractive point for employers is that this is free for 0365 consumers, but O365 isn't that good either IMHO.
What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.
There really shouldn't be this much delay between tech advancing and legal frameworks figuring out how the old rights apply to our new environment.
Sometimes it seems like coincidence wants to tell us something through the main page!
pkill teamsIf anyone is annoyed by the startup time, the snooping, or the resource usage, you can try the web app instead.
Now the moment your usage patterns don't conform you are going to get flagged and potentially punished for it.
I can totally imagine a dystopic works where instant messages become micro-tickets, with all the ceremonies related to that.
I can see people botting teams to have an automated responder after 30+randrange(30) seconds: "Hi, thank you for IMing me, I'm currently in the middle of something, I'll get back at you in a minute :)"
Tbh this is not that concerning. Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much, and probably your browser history (unless that's encrypted). Etc. It could be a lot worse.
In the Windows 10 setup screen, this dialog[1] includes "Use page prediction [...] your browsing data will be sent to Microsoft".
In Windows 10 settings, look for "Activity History" setting, "by sending Microsoft your activity history, including info about websites you browse". This is for y
In "Diagnostics & Feedback" settings, "optional diagnostic data: Send info about websites you browse".
"Improve inking and typing" - send optional inking and typing diagnostic data. Not sure how much typing data that covers.
In the Microsoft Edge browser settings (new Edge/Chromium), "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen - Help protect me from malicious sites and downloads with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen." which could be done with a local database like Chrome does, but I don't think it is, e.g. this website[2] says "The SmartScreen filter works by checking each website you visit and each file you try to download and run. It sends some quick information about them to Microsoft’s Windows Defender SmartScreen servers."
Navigation helpers: "if a website can't be found, the web address will be sent to Microsoft to try to find the correct site." setting catches typos and unavailable LAN servers, and "Show me search and site suggestions using my typed characters" catches your keystrokes in the address bar looking for internal servers and sends them to Bing.
If you sign-in to Edge to sync passwords and favourites between different devices, that includes "other browsing data". [3]
Opt-in part of the Edge Family Features, "Activity reports - See what websites your kids are visiting"
And of course if you signed into Windows with a Microsoft Account to sync your profile to Microsoft, that includes[4] Internet Explorer browsing history, typed URLs, favourites and Edge favourites, typed URLs, reading list.
> "Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much"
"Optional diagnostic data" in Windows 10 settings already covers "how you use apps and features, plus additional info about device activity".
[1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-s...
[2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-...
[3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-t...
[4]
Chat
SHARE your opinion, and your PERSONALITY.
(emphasis added)
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-teams/group-chat-soft...
P.S. We live privacy madness, try to refuse using tool with your employer etc.
If I enter the relationship voluntary and I acknowledge that there's no expectation of privacy on my employer's systems, and I understand that this is considered needed by the company on one hand and I am being paid on the other, I just don't see where there's room for me to complain.
It comes down more to how I feel about my employer to begin with. If I feel like I am in a good place, I don't worry that my boss will use my IM response ratio against me. If I am in a bad place then probably this ratio isn't going to make or break my career either - there are other bigger issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Previously, a HN commentator shared the distinction between "doing" and "justifying" work (IIRC). I really like this framing, dichotomy. And would like to synthesize with Graeber's thesis.
Another interesting contemporary view is Scott Adams' "confusopoly". I have a few other issues with Adams; I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day if I shared his bleak view of humanity. But I can't deny that he does have some very penetrating insights
BS Jobs and confusopoly are complimentary. Young idealistic me always equated capitalism with producing stuff efficiently for profit, and the sharing of that surplus. The kids today use terms like "late stage capitalism". Graeber examines financialization leading to managerialism, aka rent seeking. My rephrasing is the point is to maximize inefficiency to better transfer wealth to the management.
Apologies for this stream of conscious ideation. I'm still chewing on these concepts, insights.
Meanwhile, I sympathize with your situation and hope things improve, for everyone.
So many people now avoid it. When I read this I guess it may have been a good decision, apart from the fact that people move to uncontrolled platform like Slack and WhatsApp.
Our laws do protect us somewhat from all this "innovation" coming in from the US, just now a company had to pay 10.4 million euros for putting cams on employees[0].
Also, most of WhatsApp's plans are not allowed here.
[0]: https://lfd.niedersachsen.de/startseite/infothek/presseinfor...
* Average counts of emojis, messages, acronyms, etc. could be misused by a human reader to determine things like age, religion, or ethnicity. If we frequently use poop emojis, we could be considered immature. If we frequently use anger emojis, we could be considered hot-tempered. If we frequently use sad emojis we could be considered to have depression.
* Counts of specific words or phrases in each language could be misused to convey physical and mental health problems that may be affecting an individual.
* The median length of a user's messages not including URLs, things in quotes, or tick blocks could be used to assess whether the user tends to be concise or wordy.
That data could be sold and could make you unemployable because their statistics indicate that you're overly angry, when the anger emoji was just your shtick at your last job.
Even if you're using the data just to see when people are working, if you have a team of employees that are productive but don't communicate much, that data could be misused. If their manager doesn't get along with the team and wants to move to a different one, when a higher level manager is cutting headcount, the team manager could say that the team has always been lazy and never listens to them, so the higher level manager fires the manager and his entire team, based on data provided by the analysis of the IMs and the manager's account. Since the data isn't a true indicator, it shouldn't even be used as supporting evidence of lack of work.