Microsoft’s spooky new feature gamifies workplace surveillance

Microsoft rolled out its new “Productivity Score” feature this month, which lets bosses track how their employees use Microsoft’s suite of tools. If this sounds like an Orwellian nightmare in the making to you, you’re not alone – privacy experts slam the company for essentially gambling workplace monitoring.

When Microsoft first announced the feature in October, the company touted it as a way to provide employers with “information that transforms the way work is done.” To do this, the tool gathers data on each employee’s behavior across 73 metrics and presents a convenient breakdown to their bosses at the end of each month, Forbes Reports.

These measures include the frequency with which workers turn their cameras during virtual meetings, how often they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), if they contribute regularly shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they have used Microsoft tools such as 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, though you admittedly have to scour a dozen web pages to find them.

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

Of course, what Spataro fails to mention is that only an administrator, aka your boss, can access these controls in the first place, which is no comfort for any employee rightly concerned about potential privacy breaches. In a statement to Guardiana Microsoft spokesperson echoed this claim of choice, calling the feature an “opt-in experience,” even though workers aren’t the ones who can decide whether or not to accept.

“The Productivity Score is an opt-in experience that gives IT administrators insight into the use of technology and infrastructure,” the spokesperson said. “The information is intended to help businesses get the most from their technology investments by tackling common issues such as long start-up times, inefficient document collaboration or poor network connectivity. The information is presented in aggregate over a 28 day period and is provided at the user level so that an IT administrator can provide technical support and advice. “

Privacy experts are understandably pissed off when they see blatantly repackaged workplace surveillance as a tool to boost productivity, and with a game-themed “score” design, nothing less. David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of the Basecamp office suite, described the feature’s design as “morally bankrupt” in a series of tweets this week.

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

Wolfie Christl, data protection researcher, who called the functionality “problematic on several levels”, highlighted that while Microsoft offers employers the option to disable employee monitoring, it is enabled by default when Microsoft 365 is first started. He added that Microsoft’s new tool could even be illegal in some countries of the European Union being gave themstrict regulation on how businesses can access user data.

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

“One way to understand how scary this diagram 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 communicate the results 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 worker engagement, among other data. And with coronavirus cases continuing to rise record heights in the United States, experts expect that the development and adoption of these tools will not go up further.