Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I really hate their reports too, their "Insights". Telling me how I should be doing my job and if I used their sacred features enough to be a worthy employee. Once it was telling me I didn't use the @mention feature in Teams enough, stuff like that. You know, that Teams that is constantly crashing or hanging and takes about a minute to launch. Maybe make it actually work before lecturing me on how to use it?

Not to mention they use the same standards to evaluate everybody. Whereas in some jobs (e.g. project manager) it's good to be on calls all day whereas with others (e.g. technical roles) it's important to have time to focus. They don't take this into account at all.

Of course I turn that crap off. I don't get the reports. But I'm sure it doesn't stop the actual collection of data. And more worrying, it shows there's people at Microsoft who think this stuff is a good idea and totally justifiable. Eeeew.

I know they say they don't show identifiable information to the employer. I have to trust them at that because I can't verify it. But collection of personal data is a bad thing whether it has consequences or not. Just knowing it's being collected changes one's behaviour and makes one feel unsafe. This is how a panopticon prison works.

Unfortunately some of the higher-ups at our company have been extensively groomed by Microsoft (remember the old saying: Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are!) so I'm sure this will be switched on as soon as they can. Insights reports are already often re-enabled as a friendly 'suggestion', of course the holy Edge has been made the standard browser with its Bing search (tm). This'll be next.

I'm not against vigilance against 'insider trust/threat' issues by the way. I know the department that follows up on these and I know some of the things they have come up with were really bad. However I believe this is a typical thing that requires targeted investigation and human detective work, not dragnets and machine learning. The same way I believe this for society in general.

> […] But collection of personal data is a bad thing whether it has consequences or not. Just knowing it's being collected changes one's behaviour and makes one feel unsafe. This is how a panopticon prison works. For those who are unfamiliar with Panopticon prisons:

> The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. > … > Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Panopticon

One could easily draw a parallel here. An interesting paragraph here describes the design of the incentive structure within the prison’s management:

> [The prison’s designer] thought that the chief mechanism that would bring the manager of the panopticon prison in line with the duty to be humane would be publicity. Bentham tried to put his duty and interest junction principle into practice by encouraging a public debate on prisons. Bentham's inspection principle applied not only to the inmates of the panopticon prison, but also the manager. The unaccountable [prison officer] was to be observed by the general public and public officials. The apparently constant surveillance of the prison inmates by the panopticon manager and the occasional observation of the manager by the general public was to solve the age old philosophic question: "Who guards the guards?"[6]

The age old answers to this philosophical question propose that a guardian for the guard to be an absurd idea, or one that plays out only with a plurality of guardians, who guard others against the deception of other guardians’ “noble lies”.

> A noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie

Dig up the old news stories from a few years ago about hedge funds buying cellphone data from phone apps, to make bets on oil prices (based on where technicians were driving/flying to). This type of surveillance is going to get more common, and Microsoft is likely going to want such a revenue stream eventually.

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