20 ms·
Microsoft Purview: Additional classifiers for Communication Compliance (preview)
- librarianscott 4y agoSo, now we can't use Teams to have the "water-cooler" moments that supervisors claim we need, but really we are having them on Signal or IOS and they just can't measure that. Organizations really, really, really hate transparency.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoThey don't want you shooting the shit with company communications mediums because that has limited upside and much less limited potential downside. Remember the famous "will the atom bomb test ignite the atmosphere" gentleman's bet those scientists had? Nobody actually thought it would but they discussed it semi-seriously. Today discussing some fanciful bad outcome like that (be it the mundane failure to deliver a product or something more interesting) is a liability when it's sitting in your company email servers. Even if that bad thing isn't what winds up happening or the people speculating aren't in a position to have accurate info the other side's lawyer or the regulator will try and construe it as proof that the company should have known ahead of time. Or, more likely, say there's some sexual harassment or adultery kerfuffle between employees. It's way better for the company if none of that happened on company provided communications tools. From the company's perspective it's avoidable risk to have work communication tools be used for informal BSing between employees. But they can't realistically prevent that so they introduce Skynet in order to make people watch their mouths and move those sensitive conversations elsewhere.
- mc4ndr3 4y agoHaving employees is a big potential liability. Having a corporation is a big potential liability. Drinking water is a big potential liability. I guess just don't do anything at all and then recalculate your risk metric.
- barrysteve 4y agoThe conversations will happen elsewhere and so will the relationships. Management is locking themselves out from the team leaders and suddenly those off site 'adult kerfuffles' are exactly the conversation you needed to hear to prevent exodus.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago> The conversations will happen elsewhere That's entirely intentional. You really don't want internal evidence of something that's going to be construed 10 years down the line as cancel-worthy, or worse, something that politicians/regulators are going to take out of context to attack you with.
- throwawaymanbot 4y ago
- indymike 4y agoNah. People like to talk and not get fires for saying the wrong keyword.
- greyhair 4y agoThis made me laugh. Back in the late 1970s, there was suspicion that the Soviet Union a had completely tapped the AT&T phone network on the East coast. I cannot remember the author of the article, but they stated that every American having any telephone call with anyone on the East coast should toss in a number of different key words to overwhelm the ability of the USSR to gather any useful intelligence, because they would be overwhelmed by data. Then they gave a list of keywords. I wish I had saved it. So my brother and I, when we called each other, would toss in the occasional 'enriched uranium' 'satellite imagery' 'battalion' 'missile test' 'weapons research' and other nonsense into our conversation. I don't know what I found funnier, the idea that some poor fool at a Soviet embassy had to listen to our conversation because a key word hit caused the recording to be saved, or the idea that the author even proposed that the idea would work.
- humbleMouse 4y agoIf you've ever thought your employer isn't monitoring the chat then you're a fool. I'd go as far to say that if you think there is any form of electronic communication that isn't being monitored on some level you're also being foolish.
- tpmx 4y agoOne approach is to run/work for small companies with adult smart people who trust each other without surveillance.
- gtvwill 4y agoLol depends what industry your in. Im a one man band msp so I literally set up these catch all employee tracking systems. Most folks don't realise they exist, even fewer use the data produced by the systems. Legit 90% of the time it's just kept in case of gov audit or something going pear shaped and we need proof it wasn't us. Trust is all well and good, but trust ain't gonna pass an audit or get you out of trouble if shit hits the fan.
- tpmx 4y agoSmall software companies doing innovative things. Any business area that might need an external audit is a severe red flag in this context. That also typically means it's less fun, IMO. A software company running a Microsoft-based email/etc system is also a red flag in this context. I mean, why...
- gtvwill 4y agoEh, it's in healthcare. Specifically disability support. I get a kick out of building software that makes providing support for these folks that need it. It makes their lives better, helps them achieve their goals. But it's also a largely tax payer funded industry in my country so hence the audits. Which is ok, as a tax payer myself I'd be pretty gutted if we as a country weren't auditing companies getting our hard earned tax dollar especially if they are in a sector like healthcare.
- tpmx 4y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/communication-compliance?view=o365-worldwide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/co...
- m-p-3 4y agoNext step will be to detect potential attempt at unionizing.
- gigel82 4y agoThey have "workplace collusion" as a category, and even more dystopian shit, like: EDIT: apparently these 2 are just jokes, sorry for not checking my sources! `Negative emotions: Expressions of sadness, unhappiness, discontent, anger, rage, anguish, or existential ennui, as these may negatively affect team cohesion. Joy: Language suggesting hopefulness, optimism, anticipation of a brighter future, faith in humankind and/or in a loving and benevolent creator, as these may imply that the user is thinking about topics other than the best interests of the organization.` From https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/v3b2mn/microsoft_introducing_ways_to_detect_people/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/v3b2mn/microsoft_...
- tazjin 4y agoThose ones are a joke. Look at the purported "Roadmap ID" that poster used.
- gigel82 4y agoThank you for pointing it out. FWIW, the "workspace collusion" one is actually real - original source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=1&filters=Rolling%20out%2CIn%20development&searchterms=collusion https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=1&...
- buildbot 4y agoIt reads pretty differently though? The specific obligations part seems like it applies to something federal.
- m-p-3 4y agoAfter social credit score, you'll have your corporate score too.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoI have zero confidence that this system is smart enough to differentiate between all these things and the legitimate variants thereof (e.g. collusion and cross team collaboration are basically indistinguishable) that companies actually want people doing or discussing and likely outnumber the bad by orders of magnitude.
- ma2rten 4y agoNLP has improved a lot in the last 5 years. I believe that this is now technically possible with the right training data.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYeah and the sad thing is companies that don't know better will flip it on because "wow look at smart Microsoft's latest feature, we better use this!" and then inadvertently fire Sally in HR because her asking people to sign a card for the VP's birthday looked suspiciously like a violation of corporate gift policies.
- blibble 4y agonext they'll offer MS AI HR that'll do that for you
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoPeople in HR don't get fired for that kind of stuff. They have a thin <whatever their color is> line to protect them.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoThe Thin Company Line
- jll29 4y agoTechnology like this will sometimes work and many times not, and the false positives and true negatives will cause a lot of harm on the way.
- Angostura 4y agoRemember the gfood old days of Usenet with signatures that deliberately contained keywards to try and DDoS the NSA's "line eater"
- SMAAART 4y agoWhat year is this? 1984?
- wly_cdgr 4y ago1984 got nothing on 2022
- SMAAART 4y agotrue.
- speed_spread 4y ago"Just tell me what year you want me to believe we're in"
- karmasimida 4y agoOr a classifier?
- totetsu 4y agoI'm already not wanting to have personal conversations on teams. My tech savvy colleagues and the ones who can be convinced are on signal, where we talk about job offers and relationships. A few others do Instagram, and get to see my art photography. And occasionally I'll bump into someone when we're both in the office and be able to say whatever not looked over by AI. There's a real chilling effect on getting to know people.
- fartcannon 4y agoSignal and WhatsApp aren't 100% trust worthy though. Why not pick something you can host yourself?
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoThis is a pretty classic example of “what’s your threat model”. WhatsApp/Signal may not be perfectly private, but it’s plenty private enough to hide trivial things like job offers from your employer.
- fartcannon 4y agoYeah, this is kind of how we got to the point where Microsoft tattles on you to your employer. Small concessions.
- dijit 4y agoRight, I'm tired of this. E2EE doesn't mean anything if you have the same entity controlling the server as is controlling the endpoints. If you control both ends of an E2EE communication and they are closed then you gain nothing over normal TLS encryption, you still trust the authority. (Whatsapp is obviously closed and yes, signal can be considered effectively closed as their client is not reliably or reproducably built from public sources and has hidden their agendas before[0]; and even depends on binary blobs from Google..) I know your favourite closed/walled messenger platform is basically religion at this point: but for heavens sake; please understand that unless you're auditing your clients or you can run trustable third-party clients; then end-to-end doesn't mean anything at all. It's just marketing buzzwords. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoO2uWrX1M&t=880s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoO2uWrX1M&t=880s
- jmyeet 4y agoThe only way this sort of thing changes is with labor organization ie unionization. The government won’t save you from efforts like this. The government represents the interests of the capital owning class. The demonization of unions is one of the most successful cases of propaganda in the last century. It’s gone so far s people who will die on the hill of Jeff Bezos paying slightly more taxes because everyone seems to think they’ll be Jeff Bezos one day.
- colechristensen 4y ago>The demonization of unions is over the most successful cases of propaganda in the last century. It is possible to see unions as both the source of some and solution to other forms of abuse.
- marricks 4y agoWhy are you saying this? It's what every single corporate pamphlet and forced talk says. No one is saying unions will bring everyone enlightenment and cure cancer. What people are saying is workers need a say in how the workplace is run and companies spending millions convincing folk otherwise should be forced to stop.
- colechristensen 4y agoFew people are able to view unions objectively instead of picking a side, a union comes with tradeoffs not universal goods or evils. There are plenty of examples of unions fixing things and plenty examples of them making things worse, your opinion of a union shouldn't be based on keeping score but actually looking at the risks and rewards. Unless an organization is particularly nice, unions make a lot of sense for low skill, high turnover jobs in large corporations; unless a organization is particularly bad, unions don't make sense in high skill professional positions.
- marricks 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
- mrfusion 4y agoAnyone else miss Office 97? You just installed it locally off a disc and it just worked when you needed it. You didn’t even need internet.
- Arrath 4y agoI'll happily use an old Office, just please splice in the "What do you want to do?" search bar so I don't have to hunt through nested menus/ribbons for some obscure formatting option I use once every 6 months.
- elromulous 4y agoOlder office didn't have the god awful ribbon.
- copperx 4y agoIn my view, the ribbon was an incredible UX innovation; I just resent Microsoft for patenting it. A ribbon could improve so much software. Don't forget that cascading menus are an antipattern. What's not to like? Common functions are one click away, and others are two clicks away. Are you saying lengthy drop-down menus were better? I don't see how.
- fartcannon 4y agoWell I used to read a list of options horizontally, then click one and read a list of options vertically. Now, with the ribbon, I must observe a grid of different sized and shaped objects. That's harder to parse, in my opinion.
- elromulous 4y agoI haven't used office in a while, but I remember that once a function wasn't in the "home" ribbon, finding it required searching through the other sections. And the division of those sections was super counterintuitive for me. Whereas I could usually hazard a pretty good guess where something would be in the drop-downs.
- Arrath 4y agoSounds like its time to set up a scheduled batch file that sends a bunch of messages around that would trigger watchdogs like this, as well as the NSA prism keywords just for funsies.
- blinded 4y agosafe to say anything happening on a work computer or work software is looked at or can be looked at by someone in the company.
- narrator 4y agoIt seems maybe not the intent, but the practical result is to use the private sector to implement CCP like social credit scores isn't it? By doing everything in the private sector they get around all those pesky constitutional protections.
- bsedlm 4y agoso the rights and freedoms are only protecting citizens from government oppression... if a private company does it, then it's fine cuz corporations are also free people. they're free people who somehow are getting to oppress and censor individual humans (otherwise the corporation is who is being oppressed), but let's pretend that we can punish them by "taking our dollars elsewhere" such that it's our own fault IMO, tracing this towards the root, I find along the way the grand system of royalties and other kinds of rent schemes. Nobody cares cuz we prefer the promise (for the majority is a promise) that we can come up with something great to make it BIG and then get to live from rent or other kinds of royalty payments
- california2077 4y agoMost large companies had "social credit scores" for decades. They're called performance reviews. Nothing new here. You just had unreasonable and naïve expectations. You now know MS Teams is monitored. You are free to seek employment in companies that don't use MS Teams if you dislike this so much.
- 4oo4 4y agoI think if you have an E5 license there is already thoughtcrime functionality built-in. I remember someone demoing this to me in a Teams user group, and no one seemed to think it was creepy at all. In addition to flagging keywords it also used AI to detect undesirable thoughts and emotions, under the guise of anti-harassment and compliance. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the feature but I think it might be this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/communication-compliance?view=o365-worldwide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/co... So I think if Microsoft existed in the world of 1984, they would easily be the preferred tech vendor for IngSoc. Side note, do you think this would also detect the money laundering and bribery going on within Microsoft itself? https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreign-corrupt-practices-bribery-whistleblower-contracting https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreig... Side-side note, I think the reason why that is allowed to still keep going on given that the SEC knows about it and that there's ample evidence has to do with national security reasons. It's extremely troubling that given all this corporate authoritarian AI tech they built that Microsoft is still trying to be the voice of reason about the dangers of AI.
- parasubvert 4y agoEmails aren’t thoughtcrimes. This is nonsense. Everything in corporate email has always been subject to read by others, there is no expectation of privacy. As we’ve seen from countless court cases, they range from boring nothingburgers, to evidence of actual crimes.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoRight, and this functionality is to punish you for nothingburgers as much as actual crimes. "Leaver" detection is something that is entirely sane for corporations to do but will be abused by the usual suspects in HR to instill fear and to retribute.
- parasubvert 4y agoOf course it is. But this is how it has always been even without this technology. The cost is lowering because the demand for is pervasive.
- bearjaws 4y agoThere is no way they will be able to make an AI at this point that will A) Be accurate B) Work across multiple contexts C) Run efficiently on billions of messages This will just result in many false positives, and unnecessary eavesdropping on employees personal conversations. Once its revealed an organization is using this, people will quickly move all conversations to another platform, even if policy forbids that. Resulting in an even greater security risk potentially. And as per usual, if Microsoft gets someone fired (e.g. comes in looking for money laundering, finds out the staff member is making fun of their boss), there will be no repercussions.
- zmmmmm 4y agoaccuracy isn't a strict requirement though if you accidentally fire 10% of good people you still have 90% of them left, and if that lets you fire 80% of the staff that are committing thought-crime it's probably a win.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoEven if it works out as you say, the chilling effect on who's left will be very real.
- bombcar 4y agoThat already exists in general - this is why CEOs get surrounded by yesmen. We already filter out people who aren’t smart enough to keep their mouth shut when necessary.
- zmgsabst 4y agoThat behavior has negative impacts on corporations though, from Amazon to Disney. Scaling the problem is likely to increase the damage.
- efitz 4y agoThere are engineers who thought it would be a good idea to develop and train these models.
- hyperhopper 4y agoAre there? I think it's much more likely there are engineers that were told to work on this, and thought that working on this would be fun, let them have an ML project, be a learning opportunity, give them something good for their performance packet, give them good experience, be good for visibility in the org, and many things like that. I don't know why jumping to the most far reaching evil option is popular in threads like this is the default.
- fartcannon 4y agoEvil is banal.
- 3np 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604567
- fartcannon 4y agoHow, for the love of god, do you defend Microsoft after this?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoB-but they write VS Code! They were supposed to have changed!
- hirvi74 4y agoThat's two strikes against them now. (I kid, VS Code is great for many, but it's not my cup of tea).
- MauranKilom 4y agoWhy is everything duplicated in this announcement? The list of classifier descriptions effectively appears twice, the first time with the text of the "What you need to do to prepare" (which, btw, says exactly nothing on how to prepare) appended to each item. What even is this site? It looks like grade A content rehashing from various MS sites...
- lucisferre 4y agoIt's ok it's from Microsoft. Nothing in Office 365 works, this won't either.
- doctor_eval 4y agoReminds me of that old joke: “the first product Microsoft makes that doesn’t suck will be a vacuum cleaner”
- paranoidrobot 4y agoI'm sure this is intended as a joke. Even if it doesn't work right - having it at all is going to result in all sorts of bullshit for employees where this is enabled. Someone digging through your emails because you happened to mention some vaguely related keywords... yeah, no.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoNormal operation of AI often involves exhilaration of data to the vendor, so I take the privacy qualifiers with a grain of salt. This most likely is turning your email inbox into something roughly as (non)private as a search engine query. It's the ultimate dark pattern, goodness knows what MS intends to do with this access.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI am almost surprised it took this long to get to this point, but I suppose the recent resignation wave made it into a viable product offering. My last MBA class was HR analytics class that, among other things, dealt with email sentiment analysis and stuff like that. Part of me was thinking average HR person won't touch this stuff, but if a company just happened to offer something that would do it for them..
- draw_down 4y ago
- bootcat 4y agoGoogle docs is way better seemingly for now,
- anm89 4y agoI've always had a preference against working with microsoft products but this is getting to the point where I'd find a new gig instead of being subjected to this stuff.
- zmmmmm 4y agoI think at least some my staff will likely resign because mandatory deep inspection / network monitoring is being forced onto everyone's computers by the IT department. It's probably the only way to stop it from happening at the moment. Unfortunately the buzzword of "zero trust" has been bent towards meaning "spy on everything your employees do".
- peterfield 4y ago"The leavers classifier detects messages that explicitly express intent to leave the organization, which is an early signal that may put the organization at risk of malicious or inadvertent data exfiltration upon departure". In other words "how to promote and encourage paranoid behaviors from employers" :(
- indrora 4y agoHave you seen high schools in the US? Once I discovered that every school-issued machine had a VNC server running on it I assumed that the contents of my screen were being recorded at every moment. Turns out I was half right, as I caught up with the IT guy afterwards and the principal (a paranoid sociopath who shouldn't be anywhere near kids) wanted the ability to catch kids when she thought they were looking at non-school related things. It's fundamental safety in a society with these sorts of companies to assume: company infra = logged until you die. Once your company has come under a subpoena for information or under some kind of long term discovery, you write emails under the assumption they're going to be in court for everyone and your mother to see.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoI am so glad to be living in a country where shenanigans like this are deeply illegal and where violations would see employers/principals facing actual jail time, so nobody does it. Land of the free indeed.
- regularfry 4y agoIt's extremely revealing that this particular classifier is framed as "prevent data loss" not "intercept skills loss" or "figure out why your employees want to leave and then fix that".
- qw 4y agoI honestly first thought this article was satire. It is so unreal to find myself in a world where this is acceptable. What's next? Installing cameras in restrooms to catch offline conversations?
- annoyingnoob 4y agoWish I could read the page but apparently my ad blocker is too offensive. Well I'd be fine with supporting the publisher through online ads but I am really not okay with the tracking those advertisers do. You ditch the tracking and any annoying ads and I'll ditch the ad blocker. Until then, we have to agree to disagree, the Faustian bargain of internet advertising is untenable.
- hatchoo 4y agoOnly when conversations are in English right? I can still use the local language? :D
- danschumann 4y agoWhat is the effect on creative expression and sociability, between co-workers, when they know they're being analyzed by a computer to figure out if they should be fired?
- 21723 4y agoThis is absolutely going to be used against unionizers, which is what's really meant by "colluding". In the US this is going to get a lot of people fired. In other parts of the world, it's going to get them killed. This kind of software is Zyklon B for the 21st century.
- creatonez 4y agoSure, surveillance capitalism is pretty horrifying, but > This kind of software is Zyklon B for the 21st century is a bit of an over-the-top comparison
- rl3 4y agoSeems to only apply to messages, for now. My understanding is that unless a call on Teams is explicitly recorded, there's no capability for the organization to monitor the content within. Is this still accurate? Are there any features in the pipeline planning to change this? Microsoft offering "communications compliance" within the same product is certainly chilling enough as it is. The reality where people lose their job as a result of previously-protected casual [voice] chat doesn't seem so crazy now. All it takes is missing a quietly-introduced feature update by a week before the organization flips the switch and doesn't tell anyone.
- alliao 4y agogiven how well voice recognition work nowadays it's really a matter of cost of implementation rather than if?
- rl3 4y agoNot even. Transcription functionality already works for explicitly-recorded meetings in Teams. I'm sure their cloud resource costs to run it are negligible, too. A change in privacy stance is all that's required. Pissing people off does incur a cost, though. Perhaps you're right.
- bombcar 4y agoI’m sure automatic transcripts of all calls is just a few developments away - it’d be desirable for call centers and I suspect it’ll be available to all eventually.
- gautamdivgi 4y agoThis seems to be office 365 implementing monitoring of official communications of employees & contractors for the office account? I don’t think it extends to a personal office 365 account, at least it didn’t seem to. Why is this exactly newsworthy? Any communication through official channels is the property of the employer anyway. To collude, leave & other stuff use personal channels maybe.
- outworlder 4y agoExcept it's an AI making decisions and flagging people who may then be the recipient of adverse actions.
- parasubvert 4y agoNews flash: there used to be entire departments of humans that did this (and in some companies there still are). Your corporate comms are monitored and there is no privacy.
- technion 4y agoThis is the part that I don't get. 15 years ago I worked at a place where there was an entire room of people who were hired to literally do nothing but read your internal mail all day. One of the deployment rules were to make sure they had unimpeded access to everything (except for executives of course). Please don't misinterpret me as suggesting I like the practice. I can see why people are upset that this technology is being offered, I am too. But I can't see why people are suggesting it's a new low for corporations that have always been doing this.
- parasubvert 4y agoNot to mention upwards of 75 years of science fiction literature that discussed the inevitability of this. The only solution that I can see: Exploit the system….
- paulmd 4y ago
- jandrusk 4y agoEmployees will just start colluding using external tools once the first few suckers get fired.
- parasubvert 4y agoYou’ll then just get fired for using the external tools. Unless you’re too valuable for them to care.
- eyeareque 4y agoI get the 1984 vibe this has. How should companies defend themselves from insider threats?
- willismichael 4y agoThis is no way to defend against inside threats. Any real threats will use other means of communication. Meanwhile this is just treating everybody as if they can't be trusted.
- parasubvert 4y agoI’m sorry, what? Have you never worked for a bank or financial company? Never had to take a drug test for your programming job? US Federal law and the Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on audit, insider trading, cyber security, ex filtration tools STRONGLY point to a corporate culture that is obsessed with defending against internal threats, because that’s the highest source of risk.
- the_optimist 4y agosure, highest source of risk. What’s the risk that, say, the FBI director is going to run a borderline op where he selectively exfiltrates information to the press. Still an insider or no?
- parasubvert 4y agoHow bout when a president does it? At some point your power/value transcends the system in place.
- the_optimist 4y agoThis is the whole point of culture and society. Mass surveillance didn’t/doesn’t work for the NSA/CIA and it sure isn’t going to work for corporate paymasters either.
- hsuduebc2 4y agoThis is pretty dystopian.
- dang 4y agoSubmitted title was "Office 365 implementing AI to detect employees colluding, leaving and more". That broke the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The proper place to include that sort of interpretation is by adding it in a comment in the thread. Then your interpretation is on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Also, a comment gives you room to actually substantiate your interpretation. On the other hand, a thread like this probably wouldn't have gotten attention without the sensational title in the first place, so this kind of submission is a borderline case and at worst a venial sin. (We still change the title once it does make the frontpage though.)
- davesque 4y agoI know it's policy to use original titles, but the editorialization in this case hardly seems sensational. Just look at the linked roadmap tickets: * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93251 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93253 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93254 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93255 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93256 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93257 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... * https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=93258 https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... The title "Microsoft Purview: Additional classifiers for Communication Compliance (preview)" sounds like nothing at all. It doesn't seem like exaggerating to say that the reality is literally Big Brother in a corporate context. Seems like your changing the title is just going to have the effect of reducing attention given to something that really needs to be exposed in clear terms.
- lamontcg 4y agoReinforces that during interviews candidates should be determining what the company uses for internal communications and choose accordingly. Anyone using Teams is already a red flag.
- smcleod 4y agoAbsolutely agree with this.
- duckmysick 4y agoWhat's a good alternative? I feel like it's a matter of time before similar feature is added to Slack and Co.
- EspadaV9 4y agoA few open source options (some with hosted plans) - Zulip - https://zulip.com https://zulip.com - Mattermost - https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com - Rocket chat - https://rocket.chat https://rocket.chat - Matrix - https://matrix.org https://matrix.org
- amilich 4y agoThis is why we started https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
- lumost 4y agohmm I think I have a new reason not to use any Microsoft products in the office. I can even claim an ethics issue with interacting with them now. Unfortunately the existence of this feature breaks trust that my management hasn't abused it, the only way to avoid this is by not engaging with Microsoft offerings such as word or excel in the office.
- cube00 4y agoIt's interesting looking at the way they try sell this monitoring to the employees as being a positive thing[1]. At least the wider population can experience what it's like to live under DTEX[2] [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/insights https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/insights [2]: https://www.dtexsystems.com https://www.dtexsystems.com
- BMc2020 4y agoMS Office Home > Admin > Exchange Admin Center > Mail Flow > Rules > Click the plus sign for New Rule > Create New Rule > Apply this rule if > Subject or Body includes > Specify a word or phrase How good the AI is, depends on the flood of false positives the current system generates. If MS is true to form getting anything useful comes at great expense. The #1 thing they search for is notably missing from the list.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- parasubvert 4y agoThis is nothing new: corporations have scanned instant messages, emails and even recorded phone calls for decades, and will fire you based on that evidence for violations of corporate policy. And will sue you or call the cops if they detect potential crimes. I’m kind of surprised so many people are shocked by this. I know of one company where dozens of people were fired because their email was scanned for external job interviews and the CIO had a report, which he used to prematurely cut staff when he needed to save budget. The only difference now is that the tech is smarter and cheaper so that you don’t need to pay as many people to spy on their coworkers. Your defence against this is to find a job where you’re too valuable for them to do anything. As with any jurisdiction where there is at will employment.
- bombcar 4y agoWhy do people persist in using work emails for personal things like job interviews?
- technion 4y agoWait until you hear someone yelling at the helpdesk because their Ashley Madison email was caught by a corporate spam filter..
- prepend 4y agoI remember during the Ashley Madison leaks there were so many work emails. I wouldn’t even use work email for buying a movie ticket much less organizing dates and affairs. Some people are weird like that. There’s also old people who only have work emails. Lots of different people in the world.
- bombcar 4y agoArguably if you're having an affair it's something to keep from your private email but your work email may not be as visible to a spouse ...
- 4y ago
- rmbeard 4y agoHas this been reported to EFF?
- creatonez 4y agoEFF has done a bit of reporting on this kind of stuff - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/inside-invasive-secretive-bossware-tracking-workers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/inside-invasive-secret...
- rmbeard 4y agoHas this been reported to EFF? Not seeing anything on their site https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
- alchemyromcom 4y agoI hope the people implementing all these policies and technologies are seriously weighing the consequences of their actions. I suspect that they are not.
- Havoc 4y agoOh great - AI thought police to make the corporate existence even bleaker. Could someone head over to MS HQ and slap some sense into whoever thought blessing the world with this is a win?
- jchw 4y agoPart of what makes stuff like this surprising is expectations of privacy. Like for example. If you start a video chat on Hangouts or Zoom, even or maybe especially on a work account, you don’t expect that meeting to be recorded or analyzed surreptitiously. I think in many places, it would be illegal. Because of this, one might feel like the same standard applies to other one-on-one and small group communication avenues, but it’s actually completely the opposite.
- schmichael 4y ago> Microsoft Purview public preview provides policies protecting products, probably punting people’s privacy.
- userbinator 4y agoPoint perfectly phrased.
- rkagerer 4y agoWhat ever happened to hiring a good team of trustworthy employees and setting out to achieve a mission together?
- AbbeFaria 4y agoFun fact: I used to work in this team. We have come a long way now that we have these advanced classifiers. You would be surprised how low tech the initial product was, by low tech I mean devoid of any ML/AI. We went GA in end of 2019. Saw a lot of interesting use cases too for e.g Japanese enterprises wanting to detect cases like suicide or intent to suicide, that is why we have multiple types of classifiers. I worked on the Infra side (not ML). That too was “low-tech” or the more apt term would be “not the latest tech”. Core parts of the app were part of a monolith (think Exchange). Then we were using a really old .NET Framework version for our MVC app. Lot of the storage technologies we used were very MS specific as well. AFAIK, all of this is still valid today.
- killjoywashere 4y agoSomeone is going to have to square this with executive branch records law. You can’t have a democracy and IngSoc. That’a not how either of them work.
- ornornor 4y agoIf you don’t feel like turning off your adblocking: https://archive.ph/3XVFT https://archive.ph/3XVFT
- DeathArrow 4y agoAt one of the previous employers, they sold part of the company to an outsourcing enterprise, including employees and founded a new one to move the remaining employees. As a part "of being sold company" When I wanted to interview to the new company, my future to be manager send me his phone number, and advised not to use Teams for any sensitive conversation.
- HeckFeck 4y agoWe're slowly closing the gap with China, aren't we? What will happen when this technology is applied more widely?
- leroman 4y agoEmployees get what they need and give what they can.. But seriously, I always found it amusing that once you step into a corporate you can get food, drinks & other amnesties for free.. almost like it's a socialist society.. But when said employees step outside, they are the first in-line for the capitalist agenda..
- jll29 4y agoOne word: outrageous!
- greyhair 4y agoThat link was not happy about my pihole swallowing their ad links, so I could not read it. I will say, however, that I don't use my personal phone to host any employer apps. It is my phone, not theirs. I pay the service fee. So conversations I have on my phone are mine. My coworkers all operate the same way.
- cheinyeanlim 4y agoThere are good and bad for those feature. The only rule of thumb: Never perform non-working related matter in workplace or facility provided by company, no matter how good your performance in company or how good your relationship with superior.