In late October Microsoft released a new “Productivity Score” feature as part of Microsoft 365. The feature enabled full workplace surveillance by letting managers see individual user data by default. Predictably, they are now responding to pressure following a privacy backlash:
“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,” wrote Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365 corporate vice president, in a post this morning. “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.”
Interestingly Microsoft is now claiming that the new feature was never intended to measure individual productivity:
“Over the last few days, we’ve realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product,” Spataro wrote. “Productivity Score produces a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users.”