Microsoft Opens the Door to Surveillance Workers. The Productivity Score, a tool in Microsoft 365, is under fire for its employee surveillance capabilities.
Microsoft, and specifically the Productivity Score in Microsoft 365, is getting the wind from the front.
The tool allows, according to Microsoft itself, to see how an organization uses mail, chat and other messages to communicate, how employees work together in cloud documents and more.
In addition, managers and IT administrators can check the activities of individual employees, something that Microsoft itself demonstrates in a blog post about the tool.
The company touts the tool as a way to get the technical logistics of an organization running smoothly. If everyone uses Sharepoint, maybe more resources need to go to Sharepoint, that principle.
But in practice, you can see whether employee Jan sends a lot of emails every day, and how many documents employee Linda has put on the shared cloud. Microsoft also offers the option of reports where companies can compare their ‘productivity’ with other companies.
All this sounds like it can be abused to look at employees, and that is also what researcher Wolfie Christl points out on Twitter.