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As bad as it is, isn't it great that they announce that they are spying on us? They wouldn't really need to - how would we know, if they didn't? Enough naivet

As bad as it is, isn't it great that they announce that they are spying on us? They wouldn't really need to - how would we know, if they didn't? Enough naivety... If people don't think that this has been going on for years, or that they actually announce Orwellian surveillance, I'm not sure what to tell you! We have been already living in a track and trace world - what is happening is that it is becoming overt. And there is nothing to be done about it. We all need the paycheck, right? Even if there is a massive outcry about this - and I doubt there will be - they will just come back and do it another way. They claim it is a right for employers to get the 'metrics'. What's kind of dark, twisted and funny, is that the people building the cages of today and tomorrow, are doing so with open eyes - technologists are some of the most surveilled people about, but - no problem! - we'll code tomorrow's hell for you!

6c696e7578 6y ago
What bothers me is that this system probably works at M$, which means their managers are probably using it to monitor their staff, using their inhouse tools. That probably has a good ROI since finding issues with their products is helpful. However, for another company this metric is just a value of how well locked into the M$ stack they are. If it were my company, heavy users would be penalised as there are other, better, less expensive products to use. Sitting in Teams talking to people is not a good score. Firstly you're wasting 512MB of that company laptop on a single web page, secondly it is a slow communication tool and thirdly, if you were talking in IRC then the conversation would be logged for others to grep and find answers to similar issues. Scoring high with M$ Word would also be a negative thing in my view, that shows that you're using a tool that locks the company into an upgrade cycle for future M$ Word versions. Did you not think to use Libre Office or perhaps MD? Scoring high in Outlook is also negative, that's another tool that can't store .msg files in open way. Every time a .msg file is attached to something and exchanged, via another tool then the receiver needs something that can disassemble the .msg into a readable form.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
There's a difference between hearing that such things happen, and suddenly finding an "Insights" (or more recently, "Cortana") e-mail in your inbox, telling you how much time you've spent on meetings, and "collaborating via e-mail and Teams", over the past week, complete with a friendly question like "did you make good use of your focus time this week?". The latter can really make you viscerally aware of just how much you're being surveilled, and in concrete terms. (Or the helpful Cortana e-mailing you excerpts from your conversations, in which it highlighted what it interprets to be pending tasks. And because it comes as an e-mail, you know it's not being computed locally.)

6c696e7578 6y ago

What bothers me is that this system probably works at M$, which means their managers are probably using it to monitor their staff, using their inhouse tools. That probably has a good ROI since finding issues with their products is helpful. However, for another company this metric is just a value of how well locked into the M$ stack they are. If it were my company, heavy users would be penalised as there are other, better, less expensive products to use. Sitting in Teams talking to people is not a good score. Firstly you're wasting 512MB of that company laptop on a single web page, secondly it is a slow communication tool and thirdly, if you were talking in IRC then the conversation would be logged for others to grep and find answers to similar issues. Scoring high with M$ Word would also be a negative thing in my view, that shows that you're using a tool that locks the company into an upgrade cycle for future M$ Word versions. Did you not think to use Libre Office or perhaps MD? Scoring high in Outlook is also negative, that's another tool that can't store .msg files in open way. Every time a .msg file is attached to something and exchanged, via another tool then the receiver needs something that can disassemble the .msg into a readable form.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

There's a difference between hearing that such things happen, and suddenly finding an "Insights" (or more recently, "Cortana") e-mail in your inbox, telling you how much time you've spent on meetings, and "collaborating via e-mail and Teams", over the past week, complete with a friendly question like "did you make good use of your focus time this week?". The latter can really make you viscerally aware of just how much you're being surveilled, and in concrete terms. (Or the helpful Cortana e-mailing you excerpts from your conversations, in which it highlighted what it interprets to be pending tasks. And because it comes as an e-mail, you know it's not being computed locally.)