Microsoft’s spooky new feature gamifies workplace surveillance

Microsoft this month released its new Productivity Score feature, which allows managers to track how their employees use Microsoft’s suite of tools. If this sounds like an Orwellian nightmare in the making, you’re not alone: ​​privacy experts blame the company for essentially gambling. workplace monitoring.

When Microsoft first announced the feature in October, the company touted it as a way to deliver “knowledge that transforms the way work is done” to employers. To do this, the tool collects data on the behavior of each employee through 73 metrics and presents a useful breakdown to their bosses at the end of each month, Forbes Reports.

These measures include the frequency with which workers turn on their cameras

in virtual meetings, how often do they send emails (and how many contain @mentions), if contribute regularly shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook or Teams in the past month, Just to name a few

. Microsoft describes all of the ways it monitors you through its office suite in the company’s own documentation, although it’s true that you’ll have to search a dozen web pages to find them.

Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, specified in a blog post that the feature, which debuted with little fanfare on Nov. 17, “is not a job monitoring tool” and that Microsoft has incorporated several security measures to demonstrate its commitment to privacy. For example, each employee’s productivity score is summed over a 28-day period, and privacy controls are available to anonymize this data or delete it entirely.

Of course, what Spataro fails to mention is that only an administratorYou, also known as your boss, can access these controls first, which is no comfort to any employee who is rightly concerned about potential privacy breaches. In a statement to Guardian, a Microsoft spokesperson echoed the election claim, calling the role “a voluntary subscription experience,” although workers are not the ones who can decide whether or not to accept.

“The productivity assessment is an optional experiment that provides IT administrators with insight into the use of technology and infrastructure,” the spokesperson said. “This information is intended to help companies get the most from their technology investments by tackling common issues such as long start-up times, inefficient document collaboration, or poor network connectivity. Statistics are displayed collectively over a 28 day period and provided at the user level so that an IT administrator can provide technical support and advice.

Privacy experts are understandably angry that blatantly repackaged workplace surveillance is seen as a productivity-boosting tool, and with nothing less than a cheesy game-themed “score” design. David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of the Basecamp office suite, described the concept of the function as “morally ruined at its heart” in a series of tweets this week.

“The word dystopian is not strong enough to describe the new hell that Microsoft has just opened,” he said. “Being under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse. Having to worry about looking busy with stats is the last thing we should do on someone right now. “

Wolfie Christl, data privacy researcher, who called the feature “problematic on several levels”, he pointed Although Microsoft offers employers the option to turn off employee monitoring, it is turned on by default when they start Microsoft 365 for the first time. He added that Microsoft’s new tool could even be illegal in some countries of the European Union given thestrict regulation on how businesses can access user data.

Heinemeier Hansson summed up how worrying Microsoft’s “productivity score” is in one of his tweets:

“One way to crystallize how scary this pattern is is to imagine a person with a stopwatch and a clipboard sitting behind you. Meticulously record the time you spend on each task, compile a file on everyone doing the same, then report the results back to management, ”he said.

Workplace surveillance has become a particularly prevalent concern this year, with the pandemic pushing more people to work from home. In June, the research firm Gartner

found that 16% of employers used monitoring tools more frequently to track computer usage, internal communications, and employee engagement, among other data. And with coronavirus cases continuing to rise to record heights in the United States, experts hope that the development and adoption of these tools increase even more.