I’ve looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users and my head is spinning

My head is recovering from a kind of pivot.

You see, a few weeks ago Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times, that Teams may soon become as important a digital platform as the Internet browser. Yes, Microsoft Teams.

It surprised me a bit. The world seems to have moved quite quickly lately.

I thought of all those employees working from home, real people who have been brought into Teams. I wondered if they liked it. I also wondered how well he records what they do.

See, this became a particularly poignant issue when Microsoft slipped into a puddle of controversy with its – since modified – 365 productivity score feature that appeared to rate individual employees for their alleged production.

So I set off to find details of how Teams captures data and delivers it to customers – and to examine the nuances from an employee perspective.

Team up with information.

As early as June, Microsoft was explaining in somewhat legalistic terms that it gladly recorded so much Teams activity for the benefit of employers and that it was up to them to decide what to do with it.

Example wording of good Redmond lawyers: “Our customers are the controllers of the data provided to Microsoft, as set out in the Terms of Online Services, and they determine the legal bases for processing.”

From what I could see, Teams recovers all of your chats, voicemail messages, shared meetings, files, transcripts, your profile details including your email address and phone number, and a detailed analysis what you were wearing on the call. (I may have invented the latter.)

Cut until September and Microsoft has offered a bit more on the Teams Activity Report (updated since). Here is a sentence which is not surprising but which remains a little uncomfortable: “The table gives you a breakdown of the use by user.”

Everything from the number of meetings the user has hosted to the number of urgent messages the user has sent is logged. Separate numbers are given for scheduled and ad hoc meetings. Even the time for individual screen sharing is here.

It’s remarkably detailed. But, I hear you cry, is that detailed enough?

In October, Redmond therefore offered “a new analysis and reporting experience for Microsoft Teams.” (This was updated last week.)

I admit that just staring at this made me spin around in wonder several times. Microsoft measures privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons someone may have been blocked, and “the number of messages a user has posted to a private discussion.”

I know you will tell me that this is all normal. This is just what you would expect in today’s techno-wonderful world.

Yet, as far as I know, employees don’t have much of a say in all of this. They are forced to access a particular platform without much control over what that platform can personally record about them, with their employer being the potential beneficiary.

I imagined an individual – or even a whole team – summoned by their boss and saying, “You didn’t respond to 47 Teams messages last month.”

What do you say to that? “Well, I suspect those 47 messages were sent by brown idiots who send as many Teams messages as possible, so their innate industry shows up in your Teams analytics reports.”

Not everyone in the teams is happy.

Some employees are clearly concerned about the extent of Teams’ potential monitoring work. A Reddit thread from last year offered a little insight into employee concerns. Example: “Since moving to full-time remote work, I can’t mind feeling that my boss is using Teams to monitor and evaluate our productivity. Is this something I should be worried about or am I? paranoid?”

Could it be both?

I understand the more data you have the wiser you will be. But I couldn’t help but ask Microsoft if there were any reasons for the employees here. For example, does Teams really save the actual messages that a user posts to a Teams discussion? I also asked if there is anything an individual employee could do to improve their own team’s privacy.

A spokesperson for the company told me, “At Microsoft, we believe data-driven insight is essential to empower individuals and organizations to do more”.

Ah, it’s all about success? A noble pursuit, surely. But there are other ways you can empower people, can’t you?

The Microsoft spokesperson continued, “We also believe that privacy is a human right and we are deeply committed to the privacy of everyone who uses our products. Only the global administrator has rights over it. analysis and reporting experience, which provides information about how the organization uses Microsoft Teams, not the content of the message itself. ”

I am afraid that you carefully analyze these words and that you are still a little concerned. You might be rushing to make some very special friends online with your Global Administrator.

Surely there will always be a concern that even if a specific user is not identified, the deputy head will not have to work too hard to find out who he is.

But is it good team management?

From Microsoft’s perspective, you might see the (business) dilemma. You want to impress your customers and earn their full engagement across Teams’ world, but you know privacy is an important topic.

So you try to offer as much as you can, as close to the privacy limit as possible. (And, in the case of the Productivity Score, beyond.)

I can’t help but wonder if all of this data digestion reflects an obsessive mindset that can be the opposite of both productivity and good management.

The most detailed analysis, if widely disseminated, could be a windfall for the micro-manager and a sort of purgatory for the manager who thinks there is a bit more instinct to lead and motivate human employees. .

There is a knack in appreciating what employees actually do, as opposed to what the data might “tell” they are doing.

Some might wonder if Microsoft’s customers are really begging for this type of information or if this is Redmond’s way, as they say on the marketing department’s Zoom calls, to add value and create a competitive advantage. .

A marketer might also wonder if a great way to sell video conferencing products would be to brag about not collecting so much personal data. Oh, what am I saying? Teams can be as large as the Internet browser – and examine all the data browsers collect.

I wonder how many employees – and how many companies – currently know how much information is now hosted in Microsoft Teams.

Or have companies already invested in some of the best employee monitoring software out there now?