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Concerns about the misuse of employee usage data of apps like Office 365 and Teams led to a rapid turnaround for Microsoft.
The company had logged application usage data at the user level and claimed that corporate clients could use this data to measure both the productivity and influence of their employees. Microsoft has now announced that it has heard the concerns about this and taken immediate action …
Context
Tools designed to measure the use of Microsoft applications give organizations a “productivity score”. However, it went a step further and allowed businesses to get down to the level of individual users, or even see how many times they @ mentioned people in their emails.
Worse yet, Microsoft has claimed to be able to use this data to enable companies to judge the influence of their employees.
Microsoft U-turn
The company said in a blog post that it is now deleting user-level data.
We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard over the past few days and are moving quickly to respond by removing usernames from the product entirely. This change will ensure that the Productivity Score cannot be used to monitor individual employees. At Microsoft, we’re committed to both data-driven information and user privacy. We always strive to find the right balance, but if and when we fail, we will listen carefully and make the appropriate adjustments.
We’re making the following changes to the Productivity Score:
First, we remove the usernames from the product. During preview, we added a feature that showed end user names and associated actions over a 28 day period. In response to comments from the past week, we are removing this feature completely. Going forward, the communication, meeting, content collaboration, teamwork and mobility metrics of the productivity score will only aggregate data at the organization level, which will clearly measure the ‘adoption of key functionalities at the organization level. No one in the organization will be able to use the Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user uses apps and services in Microsoft 365.
Second, we’re changing the user interface to make it more clear that the productivity score is a measure of organizational technology adoption, not individual user behavior. […]
The other three product metrics (Microsoft 365 app health, network connectivity, and endpoint analysis) do not include usernames.
Technically, some data could still be linked to specific individuals, as it includes device identifiers, but omitting usernames should at least reduce the likelihood that businesses will use the data in this way.
Photo: Matthew Henry on Unsplash
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