Accusations against Microsoft: Office to enable monitoring of employees

Microsoft is under fire. The reason is the analysis tool "MyAnalytics", which summarizes various information on the use of Office applications. For data protectionists, this gives reason to worry that employees could be monitored by their bosses.

Tech giant Microsoft is facing serious accusations. This involves the use of Office 365 and the "MyAnalytics" analysis tool. As Bild.de reports, the data could probably be used by employers to spy on their own employees. The data would not only summarize how productive an employee is, but also how well they network with others or how quickly they respond to requests.

Employee data is anonymized for the tool. However, team leaders and bosses still have access to the data and can make decisions based on it. Recently, concerns were raised about the so-called "Productivity Score," which summarizes the productivity of individual employees. Only after concerns were raised by data protectionists did Microsoft anonymize the data.

How is data collection prevented?

Currently, there is no way for employees to object to this data collection. Only the team leaders themselves have the option of not accessing the reports or even deactivating them. However, it is still not known whether the data will continue to be collected in the background in order to directly provide analyses again in case of reactivation.

It remains questionable how Microsoft will react to these accusations. After the company has already limited the "Productivity Score" by anonymizing it, a revision of the entire data tool would also be possible.