According to a report published by the British newspaper 'The Guardian', Microsoft 365 includes a range of tools and features that allow managers and business owners to spy on employees.
This feature, which Microsoft has added to workplace monitoring features, allows managers to use Microsoft 365 to track the activity of their employees at the individual level.
According to Microsoft's blog, the tools, first released in 2019, are designed to "provide you with a vision of how your organization works" and to gather information about everything from email usage to network connectivity to the main percentage of office productivity.
By default, the reports also allow managers to search employee data, including each employee's participation in group conversations, messages, or any collaboration or communication activity between employees, which is an explicit breach of employee privacy, and gives managers the opportunity to judge employees on a personal basis, rather than just the quality of their work.
For its part, Microsoft says that this data at the individual level is only intended to support IT.
Also among the criticism sought by the report to Microsov is the allocation of an "impact score" for each employee, which is "a digital score that indicates how well a person communicates within the company." The documents show that this result is calculated based on the use of Microsoft tools by every employee!
These loopholes raised by the Guardian report and a number of privacy researchers could open a door to problems for Microsoft that could affect the reputation of Microsoft 365, because certainly no one would be under constant surveillance at work.
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