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I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

zdnet.com

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Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#11

Post by branon »

arpyzo wrote: post #5

I personally find Teams to be an abomination. I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea". Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list…

Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons.

You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well.

Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer.

On top of that, it doesn't even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop/web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can't even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video.

Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it's almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that's available when the core of the program/service is so lacking in comparison.

The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft's services is convenient. It's nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling/joining/managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing.

Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio/video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype.

All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom.

I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn't seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don't even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#12

Post by fnord123 »

When I've used Teams it took 15 minutes to start. This ended up with an error that it could not find my home SMB mount while in the office (I guess it retried a few times before giving up). So you can add 'crawling network mounts' to the list of unpleasant things that Teams does.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#13

Post by j1elo »

This is not a constructive comment, but I just found it amazing that this entry was right below the one about a GDPR fine to a company for violations of employee privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25813559

Sometimes it seems like coincidence wants to tell us something through the main page!

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#14

Post by leipert »

prepend wrote: post #6

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…

> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy.

The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know what.

This especially bad for the folks who aren’t able to properly put those devices in a separate subnet and protect themselves.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#15

Post by SkyPuncher »

grecy wrote: post #8
prepend wrote: post #6

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…

> Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?

If you're doing it on a company machine, haven't you implicitly given you permission to see that data?

You don't have privacy on company equipment.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#16

Post by prepend »

leipert wrote: post #14
prepend wrote: post #6

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…

> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy. The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know…

Or you have both. For example, I have work equipment and personal equipment on my same home desk.

My home network blocks a lot of traffic, but I’d be really surprised if my personal device provided any telemetry to work.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#17

Post by prepend »

grecy wrote: post #8
prepend wrote: post #6

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…

> Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?

Sadly, not in the states I’ve worked. There’s a login banner on work machines letting them see everything.

Fortunately, my org doesn’t actually mitm bank sites.

I tried looking for cases where this was tried and haven’t found any. I would like to see this prosecuted as it seems wrong.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#18

Post by AnonC »

> For example, does Teams really record the actual messages a user posts in a Teams chat?

I’m confused with this question. Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like Teams has (or will have) any kind of end-to-end encryption in place. Teams is a sluggish and monstrous replacement for chat that stores all messages (on Microsoft’s servers if the organization uses Office 365) to synchronize views across devices. The easiest way to achieve such synchronization with history is to store everything on the servers. That also has the potential to make searching faster (though such a potential is squandered in Teams, in my experience).

> The Microsoft spokesperson continued: "We also believe that privacy is a human right, and we're deeply committed to the privacy of every person who uses our products. Only the global administrator has rights to the analytics and reporting experience, which provides insights into the ways in which the organization is using Microsoft Teams, not the message content itself."

IMO, this part is perfect wording in legalese. It doesn’t say that the global administrator does not have access to the message content. It says that the analytics and reporting experience (which the global administrator has access to) provides insight into how Teams is used and that this experience does not provide the message content. There must be another “experience” mode that provides access to all message content from every user in the organization’s scope. After all, every organization has its users emails available to it at any point in time in plain text form (unless the user has encrypted them with specific keys unknown to the organization). Why should chat be considered more private?

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#19

Post by tannhaeuser »

In my experience, Teams, even with the official Linux app (Electron-based) simply doesn't work on Linux, just like Skype for Enterprise didn't work before. Had an appointment the other week with a customer, and had to resort to dial-in with audio-only. I guess you need a corporate account or something, but Teams wouldn't say. When I wanted to start a video call, an error message would flash up briefly, like 100ms, so you can't read it - typically MS, I thought, shrugged, and deinstalled the app, for it to be never installed again. That was for a .deb-based package; a snap wouldn't even install. Regular Skype, OTOH, has worked for like 15 years.

Re: I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

#20

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

leipert wrote: post #14
prepend wrote: post #6

I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…

> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy. The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know…

> "due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets"

I have a separate work computer and home computer on my desk; the work computer is on a guest wi-fi network and cannot see local traffic. A decent wi-fi router with guest network capabilities is a trivial expense these days.

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