Microsoft waters down ‘productivity score’ surveillance tool after backlash

Even in a world of ever-increasing employee tracking, Microsoft knows it went too far.

The company announced Tuesday that, following widespread backlash, it will scale back recently announced additions to its suite of Microsoft 365 products. They let employers track employees’ digital actions in granular detail under the guise of workplace efficiency. 

Dubbed “Productivity Score,” the tool was announced via blog post in October, but gained notoriety in late November when Wolfie Christl, a researcher and privacy advocate, called attention to some of its more odious capabilities. 

“Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!),” wrote Christl on Nov. 24, “for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”

We’re talking about a lot of potential employee activities to monitor. Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365) includes access to such commonly used applications as Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. 

As Forbes reported in late November, with Productivity Score there are “73 pieces of granular data about worker behavior employers have access to, all associated with employees by name in a handy dashboard, according to Microsoft’s own documentation.”

Notably, even at launch Microsoft seemed aware that Productivity Score might be controversial. 

“Let me be clear,” wrote Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365’s corporate vice president, in the initial October blog post, “Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool.”

And yet, as Tuesday’s backtracking makes clear, there was — at the very least — the public perception of serious employee-monitoring potential with Productivity Score. 

“During preview, we added a feature that showed end-user names and associated actions over a 28-day period,” reads Tuesday’s blog post, also by Jared Spataro. “In response to feedback over the last week, we’re removing that feature entirely.”

Spataro goes further, writing that “we’re modifying the user interface to make it clearer that Productivity Score is a measure of organizational adoption of technology — and not individual user behavior.”

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Importantly, Spataro makes clear that “feedback” — like, perhaps, a scathing Twitter thread from privacy advocate and author Corey Doctorow — contributed to the changes announced Tuesday. 

“We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard over the last few days and are moving quickly to respond by removing user names entirely from the product,” write Spataro. “This change will ensure that Productivity Score can’t be used to monitor individual employees.”

If only someone, maybe even someone high up at Microsoft 365, had considered that possibility before designing an entire product around that very thing.