Microsoft 365’s Productivity Score is undergoing some changes due to privacy concerns. A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), founder of Basecamp, accused Microsoft of implementing the “most invasive workplace surveillance system known to date”, in reference to the feature called ‘Productivity Score’ presented for Microsoft 365.
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The criticism came because this productivity measurement tool allows knowing labor data of people with names and surnames. An employer could see how much time an employee spent sending emails or using the company’s chat. The criticism was huge from different fronts because the functionality could even be illegal in some countries. Microsoft did not respond directly to the comments made about this but has now somewhat retracted the implementation of the functionality.
Microsoft’s comment on the current state of Productivity Score was this: “We’ve heard the feedback, and today we’re responding by making changes to the product to further bolster privacy for customers.” “We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we’re deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products,” they added.
Regarding the specific changes to Microsoft Productivity Score, the company has announced some important points:
- The user names of employees who use Microsoft 365 will be removed. Now, after having previously announced that all actions associated with a user could be seen within a period of 28 days, now Microsoft says that, in response to criticism, they will remove the feature, and from now on, only organization-level data will be added to the Productivity Score, but not user-level data.
- They will also make changes to the Productivity Score interface to make it clear that the score it gives does not correspond to the individual productivity of each person, but reflects “organizational adoption of technology.” They claim that it was “never designed to score individual users,” which they will now clarify.
Other parts of the product, they say, do not include user names. And they reiterate the idea of the change: “This change will ensure that Productivity Score can’t be used to monitor individual employees.” We’ll just have to wait and see how it looks. The changes mentioned fit in with what Microsoft was being asked to do.
