Microsoft fixes scariest part of its ‘productivity score’

After Microsoft caused an uproar with its very weird and very invasive ‘Productivity Score’ tool, which basically spied on Microsoft 365 user activity and reported it to their employers, the company pushed back the scariest part of this feature. .

the Productivity Score is a new tool enabled by default for businesses that use Microsoft 365 services like Word, Outlook, Skype, and Excel. The tool allows employers to track what employees are doing in these departments 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 monitoring,” and for good reason: employees couldn’t opt ​​out (only employers could) and their information was shared at the user level, not across the board. ‘together, so bosses would know exactly what each worker was doing. .

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

“Going forward, the metrics for communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level, providing a clear metric. of organizational-level adoption of key features, ”said Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365 Corporate said 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 the variety of strategies, including meeting policies that require people who log in to stay on, software that monitors keystrokes, and products that use employee webcams to take pictures of them during their shift to ensure they are ‘they are at their computer. Microsoft 365’s productivity score seemed to be the culmination of standardizing an outsized corporate culture.

But, says Microsoft, that was not its intention! Which, uh, OK.

“We are changing the user interface to make it more clear 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 produces a score for the 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 need repair faster and easier, which actually makes sense. But the deployment could have been a little less scary.