3 ms·

I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft is

I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft isn't using our business data' or similar responses. People never learn.

pxc 3y ago
We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams. I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
autoexec 3y ago
Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.
- silverbax88 3y ago
  Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers. For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.

pxc 3y ago

We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams. I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.

autoexec 3y ago

Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.

silverbax88 3y ago
Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers. For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.