Microsoft Plans to Update Productivity Score to Squash Privacy Criticism

Microsoft plans to remove individual-level reporting from its MS 365 Productivity Score tool after experts debate the merits of collecting employee productivity data that can be potentially used for monitoring and surveillance.

Microsoft announced changes to the Microsoft Productivity Score after receiving backlash from privacy advocates and users for tracking employee activities. Dubbed a ‘privacy nightmare’Opens a new window ,  the Redmond tech giant was severely criticized for exercising surveillance related to communications, meetings, content collaboration, mobility, endpoint analytics, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 App health.

Microsoft Productivity Score was introduced in October 2020Opens a new window to streamline the digital activities of organizations. The tool enables managers with employee-level usage data and assigns scores to individuals based on the seven areas listed above.

The demand for such employee monitoring tools has risen 51%Opens a new window amid the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations shifted to remote work.

The argument for privacy is based on the fact that managers can find employees by name. Hence, the tool intended for measuring productivity can be used to monitor employee activities.

“Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.” tweetedOpens a new window Wolfie Christl, privacy advocate and researcher at Cracked Labs, who instigated the discussion around privacy in Microsoft Productivity Score.

See Also: Privacy, Productivity, Compliance: 3 Considerations When HR Adopts Employee Monitoring Software

Christl adds, “A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft told The Guardian that the tool is opt-in for insights “to help organizations make the most of their technology investments by addressing common pain points like long boot times, inefficient document collaboration, or poor network connectivity.”

Through a series of tweetsOpens a new window , Christl revealed that even though it is opt-in, the tool is turned on by default for individuals.

Last week I tweeted about Microsoft’s ‘productivity score’ product for MS 365 and its potential to monitor employee activities.

I welcome that Microsoft is making significant changes and will entirely remove individual-level reporting.

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) December 1, 2020Opens a new window

As a result, Microsoft has responded to these privacy concerns and is anonymizing surveilled system data by removing users’ names from the tool.  Jared SpataroOpens a new window , Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, said, “Going forward, the communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level—providing a clear measure of organization-level adoption of key features. No one in the organization will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.”

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