Microsoft fixes the scariest part of its ‘productivity score’

After Microsoft caused an uproar with its very weird and very invasive “Productivity Score” tool, which essentially spied on Microsoft 365 user activity and reported them to their employers, the company canceled the scariest part of that feature .

The Productivity Score is a new tool enabled by default for businesses using Microsoft 365 services such as Word, Outlook, Skype, and Excel. The tool allows employers to track what employees in these departments do on 73 metrics, including the number of times they turn on their cameras during meetings and the number of emails they send per day. Very cool, very normal.

Critics called it “workplace surveillance” and for good reason: employees couldn’t opt ​​out (only employers could) and their information was shared at the user level, not collectively, so the bosses know exactly what each worker was doing.

Now Microsoft says it has taken the privacy implications into account and will remove usernames from the role.

Going forward, communication, meeting, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility metrics in the productivity score will only aggregate data at the organization level, providing a clear measure of performance. ‘adoption of key functionalities at the organization level. “Said Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365, in a Tuesday blog post

announce the changes. “No one in the organization will be able to use the Productivity Score to access data on how an individual user uses apps and services in Microsoft 365.”

As many of us have adapted to a work-from-home lifestyle, it’s clear that companies are trying to monitor employee behavior with a variety of strategies, including meeting policies that require callers to keep their cameras on, software that monitors keystrokes, and products that use employee webcams to take pictures of them while on duty to ensure they are are on their way. computers. The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score seemed to be the culmination of normalizing traditional corporate culture.

But, says Microsoft, that was not their intention! Which, uh, is fine.

“We are changing the user interface to make it clearer that the productivity score is a measure of organizational adoption of technology, not individual user behavior,” continued Spataro. “Over the past few days, we realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product. The Productivity Score generates a score for your organization and was never intended to score individual users.

Microsoft is positioning the Productivity Score as a way to help IT departments track which devices that need maintenance faster and easier, which actually makes sense. But the launch could have been a little less scary.