20 ms·

I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

250 points by GordonS 6y ago

bombcar 6y ago
If you think that’s creepy check out Microsoft Delve.
mssundaram 6y ago
> your profile details including your email address and phone number, and a detailed analysis of what you were wearing on the call. (I may have made up that last one.) I think it's annoying the author chose to throw in a joke about the very point he is trying to make - that what is tracked is excessive. Or maybe this is "whoosh" over my head and I missed the point.
- oldiob 6y ago
  I also didn't like it. Someone could easily overpass this statement and start a myth.
kace91 6y ago
It is so tiring to be in an endless circle of people trying to find a new way to reach for more than they should and having to wait years for the common sense to become fact... There really shouldn't be this much delay between tech advancing and legal frameworks figuring out how the old rights apply to our new environment.
arpyzo 6y ago
I personally find Teams to be an abomination. I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea". Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list of things I detest about Teams.
- branon 6y ago
  Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well. Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer. On top of that, it doesn't even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop/web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can't even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft's services is convenient. It's nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling/joining/managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing. Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio/video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype. All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom. I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn't seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don't even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious. The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist. All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination. A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary <32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn't perfect but everything about it was in some ways sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead. The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.
prepend 6y ago
I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe even better since at least the information is audited and not available to any random sysadmin. This just makes me choose my employers more carefully as while they certainly have this data to abuse, fortunately few do not. The risk of a micromanager misusing the information mentioned in this article isn’t one of privacy, but one of being a crappy manager. If someone ever remarked on the amount of screen sharing I did or did not use as if that metric mattered, it would just help me not work for them. If someone is forced to work for someone, it’s extremely easy to game this metric and maintain privacy. I learned decades ago to assume everything on company property is recorded and stored for ever. That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy.
- grecy 6y ago
  > Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?
  - prepend 6y ago
    Sadly, not in the states I’ve worked. There’s a login banner on work machines letting them see everything. Fortunately, my org doesn’t actually mitm bank sites. I tried looking for cases where this was tried and haven’t found any. I would like to see this prosecuted as it seems wrong.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    It depends on which country you're in.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I'm sure somewhere in the many legal documents you signed to start the job (given to you after you've already resigned from your previous job, of course) you give them the right to do so.
eecks 6y ago
Does it tell them home many times it goes active to away? :)
fnord123 6y ago
When I've used Teams it took 15 minutes to start. This ended up with an error that it could not find my home SMB mount while in the office (I guess it retried a few times before giving up). So you can add 'crawling network mounts' to the list of unpleasant things that Teams does.
j1elo 6y ago
This is not a constructive comment, but I just found it amazing that this entry was right below the one about a GDPR fine to a company for violations of employee privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813559 Sometimes it seems like coincidence wants to tell us something through the main page!
AnonC 6y ago
> For example, does Teams really record the actual messages a user posts in a Teams chat? I’m confused with this question. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like Teams has (or will have) any kind of end-to-end encryption in place. Teams is a sluggish and monstrous replacement for chat that stores all messages (on Microsoft’s servers if the organization uses Office 365) to synchronize views across devices. The easiest way to achieve such synchronization with history is to store everything on the servers. That also has the potential to make searching faster (though such a potential is squandered in Teams, in my experience). > The Microsoft spokesperson continued: "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products. Only the global administrator has rights to the analytics and reporting experience, which provides insights into the ways in which the organization is using Microsoft Teams, not the message content itself." IMO, this part is perfect wording in legalese. It doesn’t say that the global administrator does not have access to the message content. It says that the analytics and reporting experience (which the global administrator has access to) provides insight into how Teams is used and that this experience does not provide the message content. There must be another “experience” mode that provides access to all message content from every user in the organization’s scope. After all, every organization has its users emails available to it at any point in time in plain text form (unless the user has encrypted them with specific keys unknown to the organization). Why should chat be considered more private?
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Teams provides minimum viable EDiscovery unless you buy a separate service. Good luck reconstructing conversations without it!
  - AnonC 6y ago
    Thanks. I didn’t know that. Wouldn’t larger organizations (if not medium sized ones or small ones) want to have that service anyway?
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      It's funny because you were talking like you knew it all, then someone with real world knowledge of Teams gave you info invalidating the key point of your argument and you just shrug it off with more assumptions. It's the entire Hacker News culture completely and wholly represented in three succinct comments.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
In my experience, Teams, even with the official Linux app (Electron-based) simply doesn't work on Linux, just like Skype for Enterprise didn't work before. Had an appointment the other week with a customer, and had to resort to dial-in with audio-only. I guess you need a corporate account or something, but Teams wouldn't say. When I wanted to start a video call, an error message would flash up briefly, like 100ms, so you can't read it - typically MS, I thought, shrugged, and deinstalled the app, for it to be never installed again. That was for a .deb-based package; a snap wouldn't even install. Regular Skype, OTOH, has worked for like 15 years.
- loopz 6y ago
  On Mint 20.1, both Teams app and webapp works. Might be dependent on distro/versions. It's still slow and bloated, so I quit it at EOD.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    On latest Ubuntu it is unusable. Consistently takes over 50% CPU and makes everything slow.
  - smartbit 6y ago
    On Fedora 31/32 was working fine (with corporate account). After the call was over ctrl+q wouldn't stop it from running, therefore I'd completely remove it with pkill teams
- LandR 6y ago
  IME Teams on Linux will occasionally completely freeze the entire OS on startup. Sometimes it recovers after 15 mins or so, sometimes it needs the machine to be physically powered off / on to recover.
  - bzzzt 6y ago
    If that can happen it's clearly an OS bug. Maybe something like an unstable driver?
proactivesvcs 6y ago
I had to close the tab at "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products". This is a blatant lie.
015a 6y ago
> "Teams could soon be a digital platform as important as the internet browser." - Satya Nadella Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not wrong. Ever since the pandemic started, 90% of our B2B SaaS platform customers (current and prospects) have asked "do you have a Teams app". Its sudden; it was not like this a year ago. Its an "end the conversation" question for maybe half of them, similar to how not having SSO was/is an "end the conversation" issue in B2B. Thankfully, Satya is only right in the domain of B2B. The web browser is critical software for any use-case, B2C and B2B; Teams will probably never breach B2C in a meaningful way. Worth saying, developing apps for Teams is quite literally the most garbage-filled process we've ever been through. We've dealt with Google Play and Android, we've dealt with Apple and iOS; this is not an overstatement, Teams is a magnitude worse than both of those combined. At their core, most apps are just iframes for a website. But their reviewers actually give a shit about how your website looks. But, they give a shit in the typical Microsoft phone-it-in inconsistent half-assed way. It took us four months to get our app approved, and we're an official "Teams Partner" (whateverthehell that's worth, it means you get a contact at Microsoft who rotates every three weeks and is woefully undertrained and only capable of giving abstract, vague advice on getting through reviews). This wasn't "pandemic four months", this was "dozens of back and forths with a brick wall". We'd submit the package, they'd complain about a dozen things, we'd invest dozens of person-hours fixing half of them, dispute the other half, they'd cave, then come back with a half-dozen totally new things. Repeat. For. Four. Months. We'd model user experiences after their own apps; nope, against design guidelines. We'd build one Teams SSO flow; they'd deprecate the library. We'd make a change; their guidelines would change. It doesn't help that 80% of the devops tech they use to "help" with Teams app dev (App Studio being the big one) literally doesn't work. The VSCode plugin breaks all the time. The quality of the entire ecosystem is bad even by Microsoft standards, which are already so low they could win an olympic limbo tournament. We finally made it through, and two of the primary engineers on the project put in their two weeks. I laughed and wished them well, and then I realized that this 1:1 with my boss that just popped up is likely him passing ownership of the project to me. At which point, I will also put in my two weeks. We have 11 engineers total; Teams single-handedly killed a quarter of our product development team. If you're ever asked to work on Teams; RUN (if you can). If you're ever asked to use Teams; RUN (if you can). It is deeply cursed; it is fundamentally, to its core, anti-user, anti-developer, and only benefits Microsoft and the so-called "Global AD Administrators". If Teams had existed in 1949, there'd be a page in the Geneva Conventions categorizing it as a Weapon of Mass Destruction and banning its use during wartime.
KingMachiavelli 6y ago
So if your work can be surmised by your activity on teams then sure teams provides those metrics too your boss. If your work and your teams usage are not closely correlated then it does not. Tbh this is not that concerning. Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much, and probably your browser history (unless that's encrypted). Etc. It could be a lot worse.
- varispeed 6y ago
  It could also take a picture every minute and record your microphone, then have running captioning on it and stream whatever has been said in the vicinity.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Microsoft already try to collect your browser history in several places, if you don't turn it off. In the Windows 10 setup screen, this dialog[1] includes "Use page prediction [...] your browsing data will be sent to Microsoft". In Windows 10 settings, look for "Activity History" setting, "by sending Microsoft your activity history, including info about websites you browse". This is for y In "Diagnostics & Feedback" settings, "optional diagnostic data: Send info about websites you browse". "Improve inking and typing" - send optional inking and typing diagnostic data. Not sure how much typing data that covers. In the Microsoft Edge browser settings (new Edge/Chromium), "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen - Help protect me from malicious sites and downloads with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen." which could be done with a local database like Chrome does, but I don't think it is, e.g. this website[2] says "The SmartScreen filter works by checking each website you visit and each file you try to download and run. It sends some quick information about them to Microsoft’s Windows Defender SmartScreen servers." Navigation helpers: "if a website can't be found, the web address will be sent to Microsoft to try to find the correct site." setting catches typos and unavailable LAN servers, and "Show me search and site suggestions using my typed characters" catches your keystrokes in the address bar looking for internal servers and sends them to Bing. If you sign-in to Edge to sync passwords and favourites between different devices, that includes "other browsing data". [3] Opt-in part of the Edge Family Features, "Activity reports - See what websites your kids are visiting" And of course if you signed into Windows with a Microsoft Account to sync your profile to Microsoft, that includes[4] Internet Explorer browsing history, typed URLs, favourites and Edge favourites, typed URLs, reading list. > "Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much" "Optional diagnostic data" in Windows 10 settings already covers "how you use apps and features, plus additional info about device activity". [1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-settings-2-100703979-orig.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-s... [2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-does-it-work/ https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-... [3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-to-sync-microsoft-edge-across-devices-e6ffa79b-ed52-aa32-47e2-5d5597fe4674 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-t... [4]
masswerk 6y ago
I really think, companies should actively inform their team leaders that metrics and scores are not an adequate measure for performance. E.g., a person may have great scores, but is in actuality just micro-managing their incompetence at the cost of everyone else's performance. Metrics may indicate a certain behavior, or they may hint at the opposite, or they may be even somewhat random, as they record just a certain slice of activity, which may or may not be representative and may be of more or less significance to an individual's total work process. Performance is still best judged by performance, that is, output and resource management and, maybe, how much and what kind of irritation a person causes in the given organisation. (Mind that there may be something like positive irritation, as well.) In the light of this, these questionable products are actually quack. (Sorry to have to say so.)
- varispeed 6y ago
  If they hired team managers that use those metrics, do you think that their peers would know this is a bad practice? It seems like this problem widespread and nobody wants to say "we don't need this data", so yes this should come from the top. However, I fear that if a company starts to suffer, the shareholders would want to know answers and data. Would any exec have dared to say "sorry we don't have any metrics about individual employee performance"?
  - masswerk 6y ago
    The problem is: It's not a viable metric in any way, meaning, it's not a metric at all. It's just another incentive for some "alternate reality".
gnicholas 6y ago
I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then immediately removed it from my login items before the call even started. But after the call, there it was again in my login items. I have never seen an application behave this way that was not widely considered to be malware.
- kerng 6y ago
  What is a "login item"? Sorry, I dont know about Macs
  - NobodyNada 6y ago
    The login items are applications that open automatically when the computer is started (like the startup folder on Windows).
- sriku 6y ago
  It seems to do the equivalent of this on my ubuntu machine too.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    Oh my, makes me glad I only used it in the browser so far. That kind of nuisance makes me glad VMs and containers exist. Maybe it's possible to restrict its access via flatpak or Snap? I have a messenger via flatpak that can't access anything outside the home/Downloads folder, but I can't say whether that restriction applies to other apps as well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - unpixer 6y ago
spektom 6y ago
What always surprises me is the fear about a company having tools to track you. Yes, there are tools, and yes you can be tracked at your workplace. The bigger question is whether your employer really uses this data to judge your contributions, or there are effective review processes where your work can be evaluated rightfully.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  It's not fear. It's disgust.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
To be fair - from their homepage [0] Chat SHARE your opinion, and your PERSONALITY. (emphasis added) [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-teams/group-chat-soft... P.S. We live privacy madness, try to refuse using tool with your employer etc.
Sebguer 6y ago
Is this actually that different than the things Slack tracks? I guess a bit more explicitly open about them, but all of the message productivity pieces are achievable in Slack.
phillc73 6y ago
The other day I found Boxcryptor for Teams[1] which seemed like a useful tool, if the company can be convinced to use it. At least it feels like an option for a privacy concerned organisation, which somehow ended up in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. [1] https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/microsoft-teams/ https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/microsoft-teams/
- smartbit 6y ago
  Anyone experience on HN with Boxcryptor? Would like to hear why you chose it? How easy it is to deploy, maintain & upgrade? And how the user acceptances/usability is?
vxNsr 6y ago
I guess this is one of the few times its beneficial to work for a German-based company with a strong workers council. Even though I'm in the US and work for the US-legal entity, because IT is managed in Germany they refuse to allow local management to access any worker tracking. Even SLAs cannot be attached to individual users, only to departments.
teekert 6y ago
Our company set message retention on Teams to 4 days, citing the GDPR as the reason :S So many people now avoid it. When I read this I guess it may have been a good decision, apart from the fact that people move to uncontrolled platform like Slack and WhatsApp. Our laws do protect us somewhat from all this "innovation" coming in from the US, just now a company had to pay 10.4 million euros for putting cams on employees[0]. Also, most of WhatsApp's plans are not allowed here. [0]: https://lfd.niedersachsen.de/startseite/infothek/presseinformationen/lfd-niedersachsen-verhangt-bussgeld-uber-10-4-millionen-euro-gegen-notebooksbilliger-de-196019.html https://lfd.niedersachsen.de/startseite/infothek/presseinfor...
resynth1943 6y ago
IMHO Teams isn't as good as they make out. Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls, alongside the blocking modals which stop you from editing documents. Moreover, the UI is a slow mess. I guess the most attractive point for employers is that this is free for 0365 consumers, but O365 isn't that good either IMHO.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  > Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.
  - resynth1943 6y ago
    They're prompts you get when you have three Teams tabs open at the same time. When you click them, it refreshes the current tab. Kicked me out of calls a couple of times.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      What are "Teams tabs"? Are you using some kind of browser based version of Teams?
      - resynth1943 6y ago
        Yeah. Privacy reasons.
chaostheory 6y ago
The thing I hate the most about Teams is how it shows you as idle within what seems like 30 seconds vs only going idle once your machine starts to sleep. There’s no way to configure this as an end user. I really started hating Teams with a passion after that. MS is losing the goodwill from Nadella rise to the CEO seat
- mktk1001 6y ago
  I use ziggle mouse to keep my active status
lmilcin 6y ago
That is going to hurt people who work at large corporations, who try to do good job and who have unusual work patterns. Now the moment your usage patterns don't conform you are going to get flagged and potentially punished for it.
varispeed 6y ago
Teams is a menace, just like IE 6.0 was. Apart from being essentially a spyware it is also chewing resources like an old locomotive, at least on Linux. It's interesting that they put so much focus on tracking, but actual usability is in dire straits. They even dared to push this crap in my Windows machine without my consent. I think the problem is that such tracking of employees is largely unregulated, so greedy execs are milking the situation while they can to stroke their egos and count those beans. Unfortunately it seems like the unions or even workers themselves are not so concerned about this. When I told my colleagues about it, they said "so what, we are tracked everywhere anyway".
jl6 6y ago
Teams has a really weird kind of lock-in - it’s impossible to print or export a chat session, and really really hard to even Ctrl-C copy text from across multiple pages of chat. The total radio silence from Microsoft on this issue, even after it being up on UserVoice for years with thousands of votes, is making me think it is less a technical issue and more an ulterior motive to trap data.
- Nux 6y ago
  Same goes for Slack. To think that I can't have the logs of what I said is pretty incredible. So much regression since the days Pidgin was a thing.
studius 6y ago
Without even any AI or ML: * Average counts of emojis, messages, acronyms, etc. could be misused by a human reader to determine things like age, religion, or ethnicity. If we frequently use poop emojis, we could be considered immature. If we frequently use anger emojis, we could be considered hot-tempered. If we frequently use sad emojis we could be considered to have depression. * Counts of specific words or phrases in each language could be misused to convey physical and mental health problems that may be affecting an individual. * The median length of a user's messages not including URLs, things in quotes, or tick blocks could be used to assess whether the user tends to be concise or wordy. That data could be sold and could make you unemployable because their statistics indicate that you're overly angry, when the anger emoji was just your shtick at your last job. Even if you're using the data just to see when people are working, if you have a team of employees that are productive but don't communicate much, that data could be misused. If their manager doesn't get along with the team and wants to move to a different one, when a higher level manager is cutting headcount, the team manager could say that the team has always been lazy and never listens to them, so the higher level manager fires the manager and his entire team, based on data provided by the analysis of the IMs and the manager's account. Since the data isn't a true indicator, it shouldn't even be used as supporting evidence of lack of work.
- smartbit 6y ago
  In GDPR this information is called Personal Identifiable Information PII.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
just had a conversation with a mate since he was convinced teams is tracking him though since he is non-technical I had to probe a little to get what he means. turns out if you have had a conversation with anyone on teams they will see your status (online/offline/ etc) even after you've left the chat. That works across domains too. Worse the status (online|busy|don't disturb) is visible even in Outlook.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
> Yet, as far as I could tell, employees don't have too much say in all this. They're forced onto a particular platform without much control over what that platform may record about them personally, with their employer being the potential beneficiary. Sorry but why is the author surprised by this? I work in corporate IT. We issue company-owned laptops / desktops / devices to employees, most of which come with Teams. Anything they do on these devices is subject to company monitoring. There is no privacy when using a company asset. All employees signed an agreement (Technology Use Policy) about this during their onboarding. Are companies asking employees to install Teams / other chat apps on their personal devices? Or is the author suggesting companies should not be able to view their employees conversations on an employee operated platform?
- hackerfromthefu 6y ago
  Absolutely many companies are creating an expectation to have teams on personal devices, such as a phone. And teams uses dark patterns to trick users into allowing the company to manage the whole device, not just the teams app.
znpy 6y ago
> I imagined an individual -- or even a whole team -- being summoned by their boss and told: "You didn't respond to 47 Teams messages last month." I can totally imagine a dystopic works where instant messages become micro-tickets, with all the ceremonies related to that. I can see people botting teams to have an automated responder after 30+randrange(30) seconds: "Hi, thank you for IMing me, I'm currently in the middle of something, I'll get back at you in a minute :)"
znpy 6y ago
By the way, at this point, when evaluating a job offer one should account the presence of Microsoft Teams as a negative thing to put on the "cons" list.
xyzelement 6y ago
Employer surveillance is the one privacy issue I can't get too upset about. If I enter the relationship voluntary and I acknowledge that there's no expectation of privacy on my employer's systems, and I understand that this is considered needed by the company on one hand and I am being paid on the other, I just don't see where there's room for me to complain. It comes down more to how I feel about my employer to begin with. If I feel like I am in a good place, I don't worry that my boss will use my IM response ratio against me. If I am in a bad place then probably this ratio isn't going to make or break my career either - there are other bigger issues.
- specialist 6y ago
  David Graeber's BB Jobs is the second most important book I've read this last year. Truly ejected me out of my worldview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Previously, a HN commentator shared the distinction between "doing" and "justifying" work (IIRC). I really like this framing, dichotomy. And would like to synthesize with Graeber's thesis. Another interesting contemporary view is Scott Adams' "confusopoly". I have a few other issues with Adams; I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day if I shared his bleak view of humanity. But I can't deny that he does have some very penetrating insights BS Jobs and confusopoly are complimentary. Young idealistic me always equated capitalism with producing stuff efficiently for profit, and the sharing of that surplus. The kids today use terms like "late stage capitalism". Graeber examines financialization leading to managerialism, aka rent seeking. My rephrasing is the point is to maximize inefficiency to better transfer wealth to the management. Apologies for this stream of conscious ideation. I'm still chewing on these concepts, insights. Meanwhile, I sympathize with your situation and hope things improve, for everyone.
twobitshifter 6y ago
Just a reminder that Teams at it’s core is just a web app. It’s possible to retain almost all the functionality by just visiting the teams website. If anyone is annoyed by the startup time, the snooping, or the resource usage, you can try the web app instead.
- vaduz 6y ago
  The web app comes with the same snooping (every little bit of analytics mentioned in the article is something that the Teams servers see - you are not stopping them by not using the app) and similar resource usage - though as bloated modern browsers are, it might be masked by the "shared" resource usage with other bloated web apps in the same browser.

250 points by GordonS 6y ago

If you think that’s creepy check out Microsoft Delve.

> your profile details including your email address and phone number, and a detailed analysis of what you were wearing on the call. (I may have made up that last one.) I think it's annoying the author chose to throw in a joke about the very point he is trying to make - that what is tracked is excessive. Or maybe this is "whoosh" over my head and I missed the point.

oldiob 6y ago
I also didn't like it. Someone could easily overpass this statement and start a myth.

kace91 6y ago

It is so tiring to be in an endless circle of people trying to find a new way to reach for more than they should and having to wait years for the common sense to become fact... There really shouldn't be this much delay between tech advancing and legal frameworks figuring out how the old rights apply to our new environment.

arpyzo 6y ago

I personally find Teams to be an abomination. I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea". Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list of things I detest about Teams.

branon 6y ago
Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well. Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer. On top of that, it doesn't even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop/web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can't even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft's services is convenient. It's nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling/joining/managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing. Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio/video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype. All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom. I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn't seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don't even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.
- userbinator 6y ago
  As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious. The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist. All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination. A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary <32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn't perfect but everything about it was in some ways sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead. The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it. Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison. This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.

prepend 6y ago

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe even better since at least the information is audited and not available to any random sysadmin. This just makes me choose my employers more carefully as while they certainly have this data to abuse, fortunately few do not. The risk of a micromanager misusing the information mentioned in this article isn’t one of privacy, but one of being a crappy manager. If someone ever remarked on the amount of screen sharing I did or did not use as if that metric mattered, it would just help me not work for them. If someone is forced to work for someone, it’s extremely easy to game this metric and maintain privacy. I learned decades ago to assume everything on company property is recorded and stored for ever. That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy.

grecy 6y ago
> Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?
- prepend 6y ago
  Sadly, not in the states I’ve worked. There’s a login banner on work machines letting them see everything. Fortunately, my org doesn’t actually mitm bank sites. I tried looking for cases where this was tried and haven’t found any. I would like to see this prosecuted as it seems wrong.
- fnord123 6y ago
  It depends on which country you're in.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I'm sure somewhere in the many legal documents you signed to start the job (given to you after you've already resigned from your previous job, of course) you give them the right to do so.

eecks 6y ago

Does it tell them home many times it goes active to away? :)

fnord123 6y ago

When I've used Teams it took 15 minutes to start. This ended up with an error that it could not find my home SMB mount while in the office (I guess it retried a few times before giving up). So you can add 'crawling network mounts' to the list of unpleasant things that Teams does.

j1elo 6y ago

This is not a constructive comment, but I just found it amazing that this entry was right below the one about a GDPR fine to a company for violations of employee privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813559 Sometimes it seems like coincidence wants to tell us something through the main page!

AnonC 6y ago

> For example, does Teams really record the actual messages a user posts in a Teams chat? I’m confused with this question. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like Teams has (or will have) any kind of end-to-end encryption in place. Teams is a sluggish and monstrous replacement for chat that stores all messages (on Microsoft’s servers if the organization uses Office 365) to synchronize views across devices. The easiest way to achieve such synchronization with history is to store everything on the servers. That also has the potential to make searching faster (though such a potential is squandered in Teams, in my experience). > The Microsoft spokesperson continued: "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products. Only the global administrator has rights to the analytics and reporting experience, which provides insights into the ways in which the organization is using Microsoft Teams, not the message content itself." IMO, this part is perfect wording in legalese. It doesn’t say that the global administrator does not have access to the message content. It says that the analytics and reporting experience (which the global administrator has access to) provides insight into how Teams is used and that this experience does not provide the message content. There must be another “experience” mode that provides access to all message content from every user in the organization’s scope. After all, every organization has its users emails available to it at any point in time in plain text form (unless the user has encrypted them with specific keys unknown to the organization). Why should chat be considered more private?

Spooky23 6y ago
Teams provides minimum viable EDiscovery unless you buy a separate service. Good luck reconstructing conversations without it!
- AnonC 6y ago
  Thanks. I didn’t know that. Wouldn’t larger organizations (if not medium sized ones or small ones) want to have that service anyway?
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    It's funny because you were talking like you knew it all, then someone with real world knowledge of Teams gave you info invalidating the key point of your argument and you just shrug it off with more assumptions. It's the entire Hacker News culture completely and wholly represented in three succinct comments.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

In my experience, Teams, even with the official Linux app (Electron-based) simply doesn't work on Linux, just like Skype for Enterprise didn't work before. Had an appointment the other week with a customer, and had to resort to dial-in with audio-only. I guess you need a corporate account or something, but Teams wouldn't say. When I wanted to start a video call, an error message would flash up briefly, like 100ms, so you can't read it - typically MS, I thought, shrugged, and deinstalled the app, for it to be never installed again. That was for a .deb-based package; a snap wouldn't even install. Regular Skype, OTOH, has worked for like 15 years.

loopz 6y ago
On Mint 20.1, both Teams app and webapp works. Might be dependent on distro/versions. It's still slow and bloated, so I quit it at EOD.
- varispeed 6y ago
  On latest Ubuntu it is unusable. Consistently takes over 50% CPU and makes everything slow.
- smartbit 6y ago
  On Fedora 31/32 was working fine (with corporate account). After the call was over ctrl+q wouldn't stop it from running, therefore I'd completely remove it with pkill teams
LandR 6y ago
IME Teams on Linux will occasionally completely freeze the entire OS on startup. Sometimes it recovers after 15 mins or so, sometimes it needs the machine to be physically powered off / on to recover.
- bzzzt 6y ago
  If that can happen it's clearly an OS bug. Maybe something like an unstable driver?

proactivesvcs 6y ago

I had to close the tab at "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products". This is a blatant lie.

015a 6y ago

> "Teams could soon be a digital platform as important as the internet browser." - Satya Nadella Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not wrong. Ever since the pandemic started, 90% of our B2B SaaS platform customers (current and prospects) have asked "do you have a Teams app". Its sudden; it was not like this a year ago. Its an "end the conversation" question for maybe half of them, similar to how not having SSO was/is an "end the conversation" issue in B2B. Thankfully, Satya is only right in the domain of B2B. The web browser is critical software for any use-case, B2C and B2B; Teams will probably never breach B2C in a meaningful way. Worth saying, developing apps for Teams is quite literally the most garbage-filled process we've ever been through. We've dealt with Google Play and Android, we've dealt with Apple and iOS; this is not an overstatement, Teams is a magnitude worse than both of those combined. At their core, most apps are just iframes for a website. But their reviewers actually give a shit about how your website looks. But, they give a shit in the typical Microsoft phone-it-in inconsistent half-assed way. It took us four months to get our app approved, and we're an official "Teams Partner" (whateverthehell that's worth, it means you get a contact at Microsoft who rotates every three weeks and is woefully undertrained and only capable of giving abstract, vague advice on getting through reviews). This wasn't "pandemic four months", this was "dozens of back and forths with a brick wall". We'd submit the package, they'd complain about a dozen things, we'd invest dozens of person-hours fixing half of them, dispute the other half, they'd cave, then come back with a half-dozen totally new things. Repeat. For. Four. Months. We'd model user experiences after their own apps; nope, against design guidelines. We'd build one Teams SSO flow; they'd deprecate the library. We'd make a change; their guidelines would change. It doesn't help that 80% of the devops tech they use to "help" with Teams app dev (App Studio being the big one) literally doesn't work. The VSCode plugin breaks all the time. The quality of the entire ecosystem is bad even by Microsoft standards, which are already so low they could win an olympic limbo tournament. We finally made it through, and two of the primary engineers on the project put in their two weeks. I laughed and wished them well, and then I realized that this 1:1 with my boss that just popped up is likely him passing ownership of the project to me. At which point, I will also put in my two weeks. We have 11 engineers total; Teams single-handedly killed a quarter of our product development team. If you're ever asked to work on Teams; RUN (if you can). If you're ever asked to use Teams; RUN (if you can). It is deeply cursed; it is fundamentally, to its core, anti-user, anti-developer, and only benefits Microsoft and the so-called "Global AD Administrators". If Teams had existed in 1949, there'd be a page in the Geneva Conventions categorizing it as a Weapon of Mass Destruction and banning its use during wartime.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago

So if your work can be surmised by your activity on teams then sure teams provides those metrics too your boss. If your work and your teams usage are not closely correlated then it does not. Tbh this is not that concerning. Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much, and probably your browser history (unless that's encrypted). Etc. It could be a lot worse.

varispeed 6y ago
It could also take a picture every minute and record your microphone, then have running captioning on it and stream whatever has been said in the vicinity.
jodrellblank 6y ago
Microsoft already try to collect your browser history in several places, if you don't turn it off. In the Windows 10 setup screen, this dialog[1] includes "Use page prediction [...] your browsing data will be sent to Microsoft". In Windows 10 settings, look for "Activity History" setting, "by sending Microsoft your activity history, including info about websites you browse". This is for y In "Diagnostics & Feedback" settings, "optional diagnostic data: Send info about websites you browse". "Improve inking and typing" - send optional inking and typing diagnostic data. Not sure how much typing data that covers. In the Microsoft Edge browser settings (new Edge/Chromium), "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen - Help protect me from malicious sites and downloads with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen." which could be done with a local database like Chrome does, but I don't think it is, e.g. this website[2] says "The SmartScreen filter works by checking each website you visit and each file you try to download and run. It sends some quick information about them to Microsoft’s Windows Defender SmartScreen servers." Navigation helpers: "if a website can't be found, the web address will be sent to Microsoft to try to find the correct site." setting catches typos and unavailable LAN servers, and "Show me search and site suggestions using my typed characters" catches your keystrokes in the address bar looking for internal servers and sends them to Bing. If you sign-in to Edge to sync passwords and favourites between different devices, that includes "other browsing data". [3] Opt-in part of the Edge Family Features, "Activity reports - See what websites your kids are visiting" And of course if you signed into Windows with a Microsoft Account to sync your profile to Microsoft, that includes[4] Internet Explorer browsing history, typed URLs, favourites and Edge favourites, typed URLs, reading list. > "Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much" "Optional diagnostic data" in Windows 10 settings already covers "how you use apps and features, plus additional info about device activity". [1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-settings-2-100703979-orig.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-s... [2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-does-it-work/ https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-... [3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-to-sync-microsoft-edge-across-devices-e6ffa79b-ed52-aa32-47e2-5d5597fe4674 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-t... [4]

masswerk 6y ago

I really think, companies should actively inform their team leaders that metrics and scores are not an adequate measure for performance. E.g., a person may have great scores, but is in actuality just micro-managing their incompetence at the cost of everyone else's performance. Metrics may indicate a certain behavior, or they may hint at the opposite, or they may be even somewhat random, as they record just a certain slice of activity, which may or may not be representative and may be of more or less significance to an individual's total work process. Performance is still best judged by performance, that is, output and resource management and, maybe, how much and what kind of irritation a person causes in the given organisation. (Mind that there may be something like positive irritation, as well.) In the light of this, these questionable products are actually quack. (Sorry to have to say so.)

varispeed 6y ago
If they hired team managers that use those metrics, do you think that their peers would know this is a bad practice? It seems like this problem widespread and nobody wants to say "we don't need this data", so yes this should come from the top. However, I fear that if a company starts to suffer, the shareholders would want to know answers and data. Would any exec have dared to say "sorry we don't have any metrics about individual employee performance"?
- masswerk 6y ago
  The problem is: It's not a viable metric in any way, meaning, it's not a metric at all. It's just another incentive for some "alternate reality".

gnicholas 6y ago

I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then immediately removed it from my login items before the call even started. But after the call, there it was again in my login items. I have never seen an application behave this way that was not widely considered to be malware.

kerng 6y ago
What is a "login item"? Sorry, I dont know about Macs
- NobodyNada 6y ago
  The login items are applications that open automatically when the computer is started (like the startup folder on Windows).
sriku 6y ago
It seems to do the equivalent of this on my ubuntu machine too.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Oh my, makes me glad I only used it in the browser so far. That kind of nuisance makes me glad VMs and containers exist. Maybe it's possible to restrict its access via flatpak or Snap? I have a messenger via flatpak that can't access anything outside the home/Downloads folder, but I can't say whether that restriction applies to other apps as well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- unpixer 6y ago

spektom 6y ago

What always surprises me is the fear about a company having tools to track you. Yes, there are tools, and yes you can be tracked at your workplace. The bigger question is whether your employer really uses this data to judge your contributions, or there are effective review processes where your work can be evaluated rightfully.

pmiller2 6y ago
It's not fear. It's disgust.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

To be fair - from their homepage [0] Chat SHARE your opinion, and your PERSONALITY. (emphasis added) [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-teams/group-chat-soft... P.S. We live privacy madness, try to refuse using tool with your employer etc.

Sebguer 6y ago

Is this actually that different than the things Slack tracks? I guess a bit more explicitly open about them, but all of the message productivity pieces are achievable in Slack.

phillc73 6y ago

The other day I found Boxcryptor for Teams[1] which seemed like a useful tool, if the company can be convinced to use it. At least it feels like an option for a privacy concerned organisation, which somehow ended up in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. [1] https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/microsoft-teams/ https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/microsoft-teams/

smartbit 6y ago
Anyone experience on HN with Boxcryptor? Would like to hear why you chose it? How easy it is to deploy, maintain & upgrade? And how the user acceptances/usability is?

vxNsr 6y ago

I guess this is one of the few times its beneficial to work for a German-based company with a strong workers council. Even though I'm in the US and work for the US-legal entity, because IT is managed in Germany they refuse to allow local management to access any worker tracking. Even SLAs cannot be attached to individual users, only to departments.

teekert 6y ago

Our company set message retention on Teams to 4 days, citing the GDPR as the reason :S So many people now avoid it. When I read this I guess it may have been a good decision, apart from the fact that people move to uncontrolled platform like Slack and WhatsApp. Our laws do protect us somewhat from all this "innovation" coming in from the US, just now a company had to pay 10.4 million euros for putting cams on employees[0]. Also, most of WhatsApp's plans are not allowed here. [0]: https://lfd.niedersachsen.de/startseite/infothek/presseinformationen/lfd-niedersachsen-verhangt-bussgeld-uber-10-4-millionen-euro-gegen-notebooksbilliger-de-196019.html https://lfd.niedersachsen.de/startseite/infothek/presseinfor...

resynth1943 6y ago

IMHO Teams isn't as good as they make out. Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls, alongside the blocking modals which stop you from editing documents. Moreover, the UI is a slow mess. I guess the most attractive point for employers is that this is free for 0365 consumers, but O365 isn't that good either IMHO.

alkonaut 6y ago
> Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.
- resynth1943 6y ago
  They're prompts you get when you have three Teams tabs open at the same time. When you click them, it refreshes the current tab. Kicked me out of calls a couple of times.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    What are "Teams tabs"? Are you using some kind of browser based version of Teams?
    - resynth1943 6y ago
      Yeah. Privacy reasons.

chaostheory 6y ago

The thing I hate the most about Teams is how it shows you as idle within what seems like 30 seconds vs only going idle once your machine starts to sleep. There’s no way to configure this as an end user. I really started hating Teams with a passion after that. MS is losing the goodwill from Nadella rise to the CEO seat

mktk1001 6y ago
I use ziggle mouse to keep my active status

lmilcin 6y ago

That is going to hurt people who work at large corporations, who try to do good job and who have unusual work patterns. Now the moment your usage patterns don't conform you are going to get flagged and potentially punished for it.

varispeed 6y ago

Teams is a menace, just like IE 6.0 was. Apart from being essentially a spyware it is also chewing resources like an old locomotive, at least on Linux. It's interesting that they put so much focus on tracking, but actual usability is in dire straits. They even dared to push this crap in my Windows machine without my consent. I think the problem is that such tracking of employees is largely unregulated, so greedy execs are milking the situation while they can to stroke their egos and count those beans. Unfortunately it seems like the unions or even workers themselves are not so concerned about this. When I told my colleagues about it, they said "so what, we are tracked everywhere anyway".

jl6 6y ago

Teams has a really weird kind of lock-in - it’s impossible to print or export a chat session, and really really hard to even Ctrl-C copy text from across multiple pages of chat. The total radio silence from Microsoft on this issue, even after it being up on UserVoice for years with thousands of votes, is making me think it is less a technical issue and more an ulterior motive to trap data.

Nux 6y ago
Same goes for Slack. To think that I can't have the logs of what I said is pretty incredible. So much regression since the days Pidgin was a thing.

studius 6y ago

Without even any AI or ML: * Average counts of emojis, messages, acronyms, etc. could be misused by a human reader to determine things like age, religion, or ethnicity. If we frequently use poop emojis, we could be considered immature. If we frequently use anger emojis, we could be considered hot-tempered. If we frequently use sad emojis we could be considered to have depression. * Counts of specific words or phrases in each language could be misused to convey physical and mental health problems that may be affecting an individual. * The median length of a user's messages not including URLs, things in quotes, or tick blocks could be used to assess whether the user tends to be concise or wordy. That data could be sold and could make you unemployable because their statistics indicate that you're overly angry, when the anger emoji was just your shtick at your last job. Even if you're using the data just to see when people are working, if you have a team of employees that are productive but don't communicate much, that data could be misused. If their manager doesn't get along with the team and wants to move to a different one, when a higher level manager is cutting headcount, the team manager could say that the team has always been lazy and never listens to them, so the higher level manager fires the manager and his entire team, based on data provided by the analysis of the IMs and the manager's account. Since the data isn't a true indicator, it shouldn't even be used as supporting evidence of lack of work.

smartbit 6y ago
In GDPR this information is called Personal Identifiable Information PII.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

just had a conversation with a mate since he was convinced teams is tracking him though since he is non-technical I had to probe a little to get what he means. turns out if you have had a conversation with anyone on teams they will see your status (online/offline/ etc) even after you've left the chat. That works across domains too. Worse the status (online|busy|don't disturb) is visible even in Outlook.

SamuelAdams 6y ago

> Yet, as far as I could tell, employees don't have too much say in all this. They're forced onto a particular platform without much control over what that platform may record about them personally, with their employer being the potential beneficiary. Sorry but why is the author surprised by this? I work in corporate IT. We issue company-owned laptops / desktops / devices to employees, most of which come with Teams. Anything they do on these devices is subject to company monitoring. There is no privacy when using a company asset. All employees signed an agreement (Technology Use Policy) about this during their onboarding. Are companies asking employees to install Teams / other chat apps on their personal devices? Or is the author suggesting companies should not be able to view their employees conversations on an employee operated platform?

hackerfromthefu 6y ago
Absolutely many companies are creating an expectation to have teams on personal devices, such as a phone. And teams uses dark patterns to trick users into allowing the company to manage the whole device, not just the teams app.

znpy 6y ago

> I imagined an individual -- or even a whole team -- being summoned by their boss and told: "You didn't respond to 47 Teams messages last month." I can totally imagine a dystopic works where instant messages become micro-tickets, with all the ceremonies related to that. I can see people botting teams to have an automated responder after 30+randrange(30) seconds: "Hi, thank you for IMing me, I'm currently in the middle of something, I'll get back at you in a minute :)"

znpy 6y ago

By the way, at this point, when evaluating a job offer one should account the presence of Microsoft Teams as a negative thing to put on the "cons" list.

xyzelement 6y ago

Employer surveillance is the one privacy issue I can't get too upset about. If I enter the relationship voluntary and I acknowledge that there's no expectation of privacy on my employer's systems, and I understand that this is considered needed by the company on one hand and I am being paid on the other, I just don't see where there's room for me to complain. It comes down more to how I feel about my employer to begin with. If I feel like I am in a good place, I don't worry that my boss will use my IM response ratio against me. If I am in a bad place then probably this ratio isn't going to make or break my career either - there are other bigger issues.

specialist 6y ago
David Graeber's BB Jobs is the second most important book I've read this last year. Truly ejected me out of my worldview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Previously, a HN commentator shared the distinction between "doing" and "justifying" work (IIRC). I really like this framing, dichotomy. And would like to synthesize with Graeber's thesis. Another interesting contemporary view is Scott Adams' "confusopoly". I have a few other issues with Adams; I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day if I shared his bleak view of humanity. But I can't deny that he does have some very penetrating insights BS Jobs and confusopoly are complimentary. Young idealistic me always equated capitalism with producing stuff efficiently for profit, and the sharing of that surplus. The kids today use terms like "late stage capitalism". Graeber examines financialization leading to managerialism, aka rent seeking. My rephrasing is the point is to maximize inefficiency to better transfer wealth to the management. Apologies for this stream of conscious ideation. I'm still chewing on these concepts, insights. Meanwhile, I sympathize with your situation and hope things improve, for everyone.

twobitshifter 6y ago

Just a reminder that Teams at it’s core is just a web app. It’s possible to retain almost all the functionality by just visiting the teams website. If anyone is annoyed by the startup time, the snooping, or the resource usage, you can try the web app instead.

vaduz 6y ago
The web app comes with the same snooping (every little bit of analytics mentioned in the article is something that the Teams servers see - you are not stopping them by not using the app) and similar resource usage - though as bloated modern browsers are, it might be masked by the "shared" resource usage with other bloated web apps in the same browser.