5 ms·

>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/20

>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 ago
  I'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 ago
  Agreed. If anything, the clickbaity title is a reflection of The Guardian's editorial liberty.
- elevenoh 6y ago
  Agree. Pretense & signalling are easy, fixes aren't.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Disagree. 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 ago
    And 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 ago
      This 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.
  - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
    This is true of all ethics blunders no matter how groveling a PR piece sounds.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    On the other hand, what does "real contrition" even mean for a corporation? A corporation isn't a person. Decisions are made by 100's or 1,000's of individual managers, each of whom join and leave over the years. CEO's enter and leave. Board membership changes. Accountability comes from people not buying a product. Or from a government fining them $$$$. I'd ask you, why do you think a voluntary statement of "contrition" from one of a corporation's single employees means anything at all? (I'm playing a little bit devil's advocate here, but I think it's worth remembering that corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such.)
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  The 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 ago
  None 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 ago
    Who'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 ago
  An 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 ago
    That's a fiction.
    - carapace 6y ago
      The "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 ago
  It 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Yeah 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

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 ago
I'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 ago
Agreed. If anything, the clickbaity title is a reflection of The Guardian's editorial liberty.
elevenoh 6y ago
Agree. Pretense & signalling are easy, fixes aren't.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
Disagree. 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 ago
  And 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 ago
    This 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.
- UnFleshedOne 6y ago
  This is true of all ethics blunders no matter how groveling a PR piece sounds.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  On the other hand, what does "real contrition" even mean for a corporation? A corporation isn't a person. Decisions are made by 100's or 1,000's of individual managers, each of whom join and leave over the years. CEO's enter and leave. Board membership changes. Accountability comes from people not buying a product. Or from a government fining them $$$$. I'd ask you, why do you think a voluntary statement of "contrition" from one of a corporation's single employees means anything at all? (I'm playing a little bit devil's advocate here, but I think it's worth remembering that corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such.)
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
The 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 ago
None 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 ago
  Who'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 ago
An 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 ago
  That's a fiction.
  - carapace 6y ago
    The "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 ago
It 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Yeah 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