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Microsoft apologises for feature criticised as workplace surveillance
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoReminds me of the "We're sorry" BP corporate apology scene from South Park that aged like fine wine. Edit: found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
- smt88 6y agoExcept it has nothing in common with that joke or situation. Microsoft didn't say sorry and then do nothing. They did the inverse: they did not apologize, but they did respond to criticism and fix the issue.
- gabrielsroka 6y ago>Microsoft apologizes I don't see the word "sorry" or "apologize" anywhere in there. They made changes. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/12/01/our-commitment-to-privacy-in-microsoft-productivity-score/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/12/0...
- stronglikedan 6y ago> I don't see the word "sorry" or "apologize" anywhere in there. Good. Apologies have become so watered down as to be meaningless. Just fix the problem, tell us how the problem was fixed, and move on. Looks like that's what they did. Good on them.
- kgwxd 6y agoI'd like to hear how the problem was introduced in the first place and how something like it will be prevented in the future.
- herodoturtle 6y agoAgreed. If anything, the clickbaity title is a reflection of The Guardian's editorial liberty.
- elevenoh 6y agoAgree. Pretense & signalling are easy, fixes aren't.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoDisagree. The lack of any real contrition — let alone accountability for those responsible — makes me suspect that they consider this a PR blunder, not an ethics blunder. They'll readily build something similar in the future if they think they can get away with it.
- colechristensen 6y agoAnd if there was, the criticism would be that a fall guy took the blame. Failures shouldn’t lead to people falling on their swords to please the public. When you make that the response, people don’t learn to not make mistakes, they learn to hide them, deny them, and shift blame.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoThis wasn’t a “mistake”, like pushing a bug to production. It was intentional. Product managers drew up a spec for the feature. Designers designed it. Engineers built it. Technical writers wrote documentation for it. Marketers promoted it. In all likelihood, the VP writing the statement knew about it as well. Plenty of people had meetings and thought about and discussed exactly what the feature was going to do. The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure. For whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Microsoft can’t fix that by making small changes to what they’ve already built to appease the public. They have to change the organization so that it doesn’t happen again.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago>whatever reason, whole teams of people at Microsoft proactively decided to build a workplace surveillance tool. Maybe the reason was nostalgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
- pmoriarty 6y ago"The failure we’re talking about is an organizational failure." As much as I despise Microsoft, this is more of an industry and even a societal failure. Taking a look at the exploitative, surveillance society we've built, it's clear that ethics are just not very important in tech, nor in business as a whole. Many of HN's readers who are now wagging their fingers at MS are probably working at companies that also spy on their users, and they either look the other way as long as they get a nice fat paycheck, don't think about it at all, or excuse it in some way. Privacy-violating sites and software don't build themselves, and there's no shortage of them in today's internet.
- StanislavPetrov 6y agoThe issue here is the misleading headline. Instead of, "Microsoft apologises for feature criticised as workplace surveillance", the headline should read something like, "Microsoft changes workplace surveillance software after outcry".
- an_opabinia 6y agoNone of that matters either. We need a national privacy law. Microsoft knows social media and readers of the Guardian are not going to be a buyer of Office surveillance and metrics software. So it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t apologize - ie, it doesn’t matter if they delegate out customer service for non paying end users to social media. This is different than say Facebook and Google, where they need more people who click on ads and convert, which is a form of payer, so they’re going to be more sensitive to user perceptions despite the absence of a national privacy policy. It’s the #1 misconception, that there is a regulatory failure around social media privacy, when really it’s everything else where there’s no meaningful market mechanism to “opt out” of eg your employer’s privacy violating surveillance. So to be really precise, the best way to get a remedy for non-paying poor people from a giant company is consistently, always, the law. It’s not a fucking post mortem scrum.
- frongpik 6y agoWho's going to benefit from the privacy law and who's going to sponsor it? Trillion dollar empires are built on surveillance and we'd need another Lincoln to stop them.
- TheRealSteel 6y agoAn apology from a publicly traded capitalist corporation can never hold any meaning anyway. Literally everything they do is designed to maximize profit at the expense of anything else. If Microsoft had a magic box with a button on it that said "If you press this, ten million innocent people will die, but nobody will ever find out and the company will make a dollar for every one" they would have a legal obligation to their shareholders to press it. A corporation can't do something, people do things. Nobody at Microsoft cares they put out surveillance software, they just estimated their was enough outrage that pulling it was more profitable than leaving it out.
- richardwhiuk 6y agoThat's a fiction.
- carapace 6y agoThe "legal obligation" is fictive, but corporations infamously do these things. E.g. Ralph Nader: > Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is a landmark non-fiction book by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, first published in 1965. Its central theme charged car manufacturers of resistance to the introduction of safety features (such as seat belts), and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed Check out what GM did: > In response to Nader's criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader's reputation. It "(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, 'questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits'; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a 'continuing' and harassing investigation of him."[12] > On March 22, 1966, GM President James Roche was forced to appear before a United States Senate subcommittee and apologized to Nader for the company's campaign of harassment and intimidation. Nader sued GM in November 1966 for invasion of privacy.[12][10] He won the case on appeal in January 1970 and was awarded $425,000, which he used to establish the Center for Auto Safety, a non-profit advocacy group. He went on to lobby for consumer rights, helping drive the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act, among others.[13] You can't make this stuff up!
- hrktb 6y agoIt matters to know if it was seen as an issue in the first place or not. That’s the difference between moving a feature to some other random place and let people assume it disappeared, and removing a feature completely on ethical grounds.
- skohan 6y ago> Good on them. I find this to be quite a stretch. A company with an atrocious record on privacy got caught violating user's privacy in an atrocious way, and they backed off amid widespread controversy. MS calculated that the cost of the bad product image outweighed the benefit of selling your data to your employer. I have no reason to believe this is going to improve their handling of data privacy in the future.
- rubidium 6y ago" Productivity Score is designed to help IT administrators measure and manage adoption so their people can get the most out of Microsoft 365. We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard over the last few days and are moving quickly to respond by removing user names entirely from the product. This change will ensure that Productivity Score can’t be used to monitor individual employees. " Seems like exactly what everyone wanted. Great response.
- tpoacher 6y ago... in the freemium edition, that is. The premium edition, however ... (joking)
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago>Great response. It might be a great response and an outcome that everyone wanted, but in no way can the Microsoft statement be accurately construed as an apology.
- partiallypro 6y agoI guess a problem is that some smaller offices use O365 and simple deduction could link the person back to the data O365 spits out. They should make the feature unavailable unless you have a certain amount of seats.
- skohan 6y agoYeah this is a major question. For instance, under GDPR rules, most restrictions relate to "personally identifiable information", which is defined as not only data which specifically identifies an individual, but any data which can be used to identify an individual. So for instance if you collect detailed information about usage patterns which includes country of origin, and you have exactly one user in Sudan, data privacy rules would apply because you would know exactly which user the data is referring to. I actually wonder how this product would have passed GDPR at all.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
- thesuitonym 6y agoOkay but what about the unchangeable five minute idle timer in Teams?
- henryackerman 6y agoBuy a mouse wiggler, problem solved.
- commandlinefan 6y agoReminds me of a story I read - some company had a batch job that ran for hours and for some reason if the computer went to screen saver, the batch job crashed and had to be restarted. Rather than actually find the root of the problem (of course), or disable screensaver (not allowed per security policy), they just assigned somebody to move the mouse every few minutes to keep the screensaver from activating. So one day, the guy brings in a vibrating baby bouncer, puts the mouse in the baby bouncer, and kicks back for the rest of the day.
- gruez 6y agoBoth of the solution seems dumb to me. Can't you play a 24 hour video? AFAIK most media players prevent the computer from going to sleep. Or even better write a program that does it for you: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34836406/how-to-prevent-windows-from-going-to-sleep-when-my-c-application-is-running https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34836406/how-to-prevent-...
- skavi 6y agoThe entire situation is dumb.
- chronicsunshine 6y agoI don't think it's that simple. From my experience, if you are in certain non-Microsoft applications and the mouse is moving it will still set you as Away and won't set your status to Available until you click into an application it recognizes.
- rustoo 6y agoMaybe Microsoft can actually use the data to create a feature to show if an employee is overworked or burnt out. That would be some good use of that tool.
- pintxo 6y agoGood? Or an option for the employer to ditch the employee before he goes on paid sick leave because of the burn out?
- skohan 6y agoYeah exactly. How long before this goes into a predictive model where employers can identify which employees are likely to start producing less in the near future?
- smt88 6y agoThere are better ways to reduce burnout than surveillance. Examples: - periodic, mandatory paid leave - "no emails after 6pm" policies - anonymous surveys to identify managers who create burnout - hiring the right number of people - effective planning
- goatinaboat 6y agoanonymous surveys to identify managers who create burnout Every “anonymous” workplace survey I’ve ever done has always had a unique URL with a GUID embedded and a warning not to forward the email to anyone.
- ev1 6y agoDon't forget the followups asking you to fill out your anonymous survey.
- qz2 6y agoCan they apologise for Telemetry in Windows 10 as well. Turning it off might do the trick...
- chadlavi 6y ago"criticized as workplace surveillance" makes it sound like it's a matter of subjective option whether or not it really is. It is workplace surveillance objectively, not merely something that can be construed as such in order to criticize. This headline should read "Microsoft apologizes for workplace surveillance feature" (though as someone else pointed out, they didn't actually apologize either).
- just-juan-post 6y agoYep, that and the mention of an apology in the headline when there is none in the body is enough for me to flag this piece of corporate propaganda.
- kace91 6y agoThe article is misleading, but the news that the feature has been rolled back is still worth sharing I think. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
- herodoturtle 6y agoAre you implying that Microsoft bribed The Guardian? Or are you perhaps saying that the The Guardian have some kind of indirect interest in massaging Microsoft's rollback into an admission of guilt? I'm curious why you suggest it might be corporate propaganda.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoIs the surveillance part the problem or the scoring of productivity? I am pretty sure most employers have the ability to log information like what was mentioned here. It's just that they don't use it for measuring productivity due to the obvious flaw that it can be hacked if employees know about it. Most companies use this type of information only when the employee is suspect of leaks or misconduct eg Google has used logged data as evidence against Anthony Levandowski of the data he transferred. Slack gives administrators most of the data for the type it was mentioned in the article. Are you sure that your employer hasn't installed any custom software/antivirus in your work device? Likely they have.
- mellosouls 6y agoAm I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft?
- maurys 6y agoYou aren't. Especially with remote work on the rise. This is one thing I hope all of us continue opposing vehemently. It's a huge privacy concern and companies have too much incentive to want to monitor this kind of data.
- epanchin 6y agoI’ve worked at a workplace before that had one of these software packages. It had a taskbar icon so everyone knew it was there. Still a bad show installing it, but at least less subtle than Microsoft’s efforts.
- ardy42 6y ago> Am I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft? I would be highly surprised if there weren't. However, it'd far worse if Microsoft provided such features, because that would mean there'd be much less friction for an enterprise to adopt them (since pretty much all of then already license Office). At least with those other suppliers, a company would have to have decided it wanted worker surveillance and seek it out, rather than getting it out-of-the-box by default.
- iimblack 6y agoNope. My work hasn't ever mentioned explicitly that they monitor us but they're also tracking productivity somehow. Interestingly, they had to tell people to stop working so much once we transitioned to work-from-home. They found that people were working way longer hours and not taking lunches.
- skohan 6y ago
- rkagerer 6y agoWhat was the specific sensitive data they reported?
- skohan 6y agoBasically metrics about how much time you are spending on Office 365 products, as well as metrics about how much certain features are being used (like @mentions in emails)
- hobs 6y agoJust wait for it to come back with less fanfare - removing usernames from a 10 person company isnt really anonymizing anything - which everyone working for a small company giving "anonymous feedback" knows.
- dustinmoris 6y agoAbsolutely. This is not a feature which any employee ever wished to have. This is aimed 100% at managers and people who decide on which products the company should buy and no better way to persuade them by giving them a surveillance tool on their employees. It will come back in pieces.
- commandlinefan 6y agoYeah, you're kidding yourself if you think that this level of surveillance is possible, but that they won't implement it due to negative feedback or any other kind of pressure. If this can be done, it will be done, and nothing will get in its way. At this point, we might all be better off adopting the attitude: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have outrun the other guy. I don't like it either, but I don't see much of an alternative.
- skohan 6y agoWe probably have to acknowledge that if you are using Windows at all, MS probably has this kind of detailed data about everything you do on your computer. This has been possible for a long time, the only boundary which was being tested here was the idea of selling this data to your employer.
- tuldia 6y agoSimply having this surveillance tool come out the door shows that there is little or no consideration for people's privacy during the planning and development process.
- anon_user22 6y agoThey have done nothing. They just stop showing names . Data is not being collected in a anonymous way
- epanchin 6y agoWho are Microsoft competing with to add this feature? Have they decided that Apple has control of the privacy hill and they’re going to get as far away from it as possible? Windows 10 is an annoyance.
- 51Cards 6y agoFinal section: “The thing I love most about Microsoft is that when we screw up, we acknowledge the error and fix it,” Snover tweeted. Ummmm... who do I send my list to?
- OscarTheGrinch 6y agoThis form of surveillance is out of the bag now. The burden now is on us as employees to say no, to insist that our contracts explicitly prohibit being surveilled.
- nemacol 6y agoJared Spataro, the corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said in a statement. “We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we’re deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products.” That is absolutely laughable.
- medium_burrito 6y agoHe should win an award for saying that with a straight face.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoYou don't get to be a "Corporate VP" in a Fortune 1000 without either being a True Believer, or being so comfortable with toeing the party line that you don't even notice the hypocrisy any more.
- Nimitz14 6y agoThis comment is absolutely laughable.
- skohan 6y agoThis is like a VP at Exon/Mobil talking about their commitment to fight climate change
- crmd 6y ago“My team and I have therefore voluntarily surrendered to the Peacekeeping Force at The Hague, Netherlands, and we welcome the investigation and verdict of the UN Committee on Human Rights”. What a joke
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoMicrosoft: overseeing, planing, developing, reviewing, refining, deploying, celebrating invasive employee surveillance Also Microsoft: Oopsie! Our bad.
- pmoriarty 6y agoWhy is it so much more common for companies to backtrack on privacy violations instead of proactively respecting privacy in the first place?
- rStar 6y ago“ Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely.” - only to be added back in as a “premium” feature.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> “No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.” Seems like the number of jobs where your effectiveness can be measured by how much time you spend in Microsoft 365 is fairly small. The number where there isn't a better metric available is likely even smaller. If you are a transcriptionist, output is nicely metered—many get paid by the word. Even most admin assistants have so much phone work and other jobs where time in O365 is only a fraction of their job. I think this is mostly a big todo about nothing. Any manager who uses something as basic as this as a metric is almost certainly worthless regardless.
- skohan 6y agoI think people's apprehension over this kind of metric is entirely justified. As you say, it's not a good measure of almost anything. But that doesn't mean an employer can't treat it as a valid metric, and use it as a justification to remove or punish employees they don't like.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIt's good that Microsoft is removing this, but I'm skeptical it will make any difference in the end. Absent this, a shitty boss is going to use some other, equally pointless metric.
- skohan 6y agoSure, but that's like saying I shouldn't get a Polio vaccine because I might get hit by a car and injure my spine.
- ogre_codes 6y agoMore like saying "You should get that polio vaccine... but you are still going to get hit by a car." Ultimately, if you have a bad boss, they are going to find some shitty way to screw you over. If you have a good boss, this is irrelevant. I do think it's good that Microsoft pulled this, I'm just cynical it will make a difference.
- adrianmonk 6y agoSurveillance aside, how is this not a garbage metric? Or at least a woefully misnamed one. "Adoption of key features" does not sound like it corresponds to productivity to me. (Maybe in very extreme cases?) I could imagine using this metric to see if I'm getting my money's worth out of the software or whether some department is slow in adopting it.
- skohan 6y agoIt's a horrible metric. It's only good for you if you are Microsoft, and you want businesses to make usage of your product into a KPI.
- zamalek 6y agoIt allows Microsoft to up-sell. "Your users aren't using X, you should encourage them to do so," "Look, your users are using X, you should purchase Y!" "Your users aren't using Y..."
- hkt 6y agoAnd there was me almost at a stage in my life when my deep distrust of Microsoft had subsided. Hah.
- skohan 6y agoI feel like I have been repeatedly gaslit that MS buying github and releasing VSCode is a sign of change vs. something I should be deeply wary about
- partiallypro 6y agoMicrosoft should patent the tech around it and then bury it in a deep bottomless pit so no one can ever do this.
- JackFr 6y agoI suspect they got rid of the feature simply because someone realized it would make plain how much useless bloat they were paying for.
- hankchinaski 6y agoi wonder if the product manager(s) responsible for rolling this crap out will be held accountable. probably not
- AHappyCamper 6y agoDidn't Google pull a move like this on Project Dragonfly - publicly state that they were dropping the project after outrage, and then quietly continue developing it in secret? I am extremely skeptical that Microsoft will simply shelve the user-specific monitoring feature. In fact, I outright don't believe them.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago> I am extremely skeptical that Microsoft will simply shelve If it makes money (directly or indirectly) or can be used to power a (feature/data/etc) moat of some kind you can absolutely bet it will return: it's been implemented now, and capitalism means that profit-motives ensure there's always pressure to bring it back, and if it's just some PR manoeuvring and the flick of a switch to re-enable it, it just becomes a case of "when" and not "if".
- tehjoker 6y agoAggregate data can still provide rough ideas for individuals in small organizations. Splitting up a deployment within a single larger organization can yield similar insights.
- trilinearnz 6y ago> Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely. [...] “No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.” I'm impressed with their response to this. The promptness and decisiveness suggests the issue was something which fell through the gaps rather than an intentional strategy.
- johanneskanybal 6y agoI can understand if people got upset. As a tech guy it’s hard to take those metrics as anything but a joke though. The less I’m forced to use a microsoft product at work the more I’ll produce.
- freedomben 6y agoIt sometimes feels like we are headed for tech-based dystopia. I just hope there are enough employers out there that will say, "we don't spy on employees" so people like me will stay employable. Thank you Red Hat for being awesome about that (I work for Red Hat and love their approach).
- chappi42 6y agoOfftopic: since theguardian.com kicked out Suzanne Moore in a rather unfriendly way, I don't read this newspaper any more (at least for some time), also no further (small) donations.
- Rafuino 6y agoIf Jeffrey Snover says they made a "screw up," the actual question to answer is how did this get approved in the first place? Thankfully we have privacy activists looking at these shady products.
- anonymfus 6y ago> Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely > The company is also changing its branding around the feature to make clear that the “productivity” that is being scored is that of organisations, not individuals OK, I was wrong when I wrote my prediction that the only thing they are going to do is to change the name of the feature (made in the previous comment in my comment history).
- Woodi 6y ago“No one in the organisation will be able to use productivity score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.” How cute :) Organization don't get it. Microsoft get it all for itself :> More data for the ads ! And not only that. All that experience or even code done by MS for China scoring system must be enforced on the rest of Earth population ! Not to mention typical metrics stupidity: lines of code, keypresses, count of videocalls ? Such thing is just proof to not use that online-desktop apps. Or straight outlaw them. But managers will love it ! Just today news: Google spies on emploeyes before firing them - no more "spying" necessary, everything will be in the "data" ! :>
- de-moray 6y ago(disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, but entirely unrelated to the team that built this.) The privacy ramifications are intense. As the youth is apt to say, "like woah". That said, I would love to see a tool that gives work-day insight where the user entirely owns and controls the data. I've found it helpful to have a summarized report on how much of my work day is spent in meetings and emails verses writing code. It helps me to have data, rather than a vague feeling as to how much time I'm spending on things and how I could optimize my time. I have no desire for HR or my management to see that information and I fully see where others having that data is ripe for abuse, but for my own sake if I totally control the data, it's useful.