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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

#21

Post by userbinator »

branon wrote: post #11
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…

As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious.

The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin already exist.

All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the "webapp everything" craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination.

A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary sane. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead.

The Teams/MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it's not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would've been a far saner approach --- it's radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I'm not surprised there's no official documentation on the API/protocol, because it's a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it.

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.

This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole "everyone can code/diversity/inclusion" movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and "disruptive change" over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.

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

#22

Post by p1necone »

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…

We just RDP into our in-office machines when we work from home.

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

#23

Post by Spooky23 »

AnonC wrote: post #18

> 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…

Teams provides minimum viable EDiscovery unless you buy a separate service. Good luck reconstructing conversations without it!

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

#24

Post by gonzo41 »

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…

Second laptop. I know it's expensive, but if your working from home, don't do it from your own computer. do it from a computer work provides. Or at least, create a second account called work and do everything from that. Also make the theme, colors and everything you can different so there's a context shift between the two activities.

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

#26

Post by amlozano »

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?

I've often wondered the same thing, but about personal health information and educational information (HIPPA, FERPA). If you intercept that data and store it, transmit it or even just allow real time access to it are you suddenly on the hook for all that those laws require?

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

#27

Post by AnonC »

Spooky23 wrote: post #23
AnonC wrote: post #18

> 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…

Teams provides minimum viable EDiscovery unless you buy a separate service. Good luck reconstructing conversations without it!

Thanks. I didn’t know that. Wouldn’t larger organizations (if not medium sized ones or small ones) want to have that service anyway?

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

#28

Post by 015a »

> "Teams could soon be a digital platform as important as the internet browser." - Satya Nadella

Every person reading this should be scared, because he's not wrong. Ever since the pandemic started, 90% of our B2B SaaS platform customers (current and prospects) have asked "do you have a Teams app". Its sudden; it was not like this a year ago. Its an "end the conversation" question for maybe half of them, similar to how not having SSO was/is an "end the conversation" issue in B2B.

Thankfully, Satya is only right in the domain of B2B. The web browser is critical software for any use-case, B2C and B2B; Teams will probably never breach B2C in a meaningful way.

Worth saying, developing apps for Teams is quite literally the most garbage-filled process we've ever been through. We've dealt with Google Play and Android, we've dealt with Apple and iOS; this is not an overstatement, Teams is a magnitude worse than both of those combined. At their core, most apps are just iframes for a website. But their reviewers actually give a shit about how your website looks. But, they give a shit in the typical Microsoft phone-it-in inconsistent half-assed way. It took us four months to get our app approved, and we're an official "Teams Partner" (whateverthehell that's worth, it means you get a contact at Microsoft who rotates every three weeks and is woefully undertrained and only capable of giving abstract, vague advice on getting through reviews). This wasn't "pandemic four months", this was "dozens of back and forths with a brick wall". We'd submit the package, they'd complain about a dozen things, we'd invest dozens of person-hours fixing half of them, dispute the other half, they'd cave, then come back with a half-dozen totally new things. Repeat. For. Four. Months. We'd model user experiences after their own apps; nope, against design guidelines. We'd build one Teams SSO flow; they'd deprecate the library. We'd make a change; their guidelines would change. It doesn't help that 80% of the devops tech they use to "help" with Teams app dev (App Studio being the big one) literally doesn't work. The VSCode plugin breaks all the time. The quality of the entire ecosystem is bad even by Microsoft standards, which are already so low they could win an olympic limbo tournament.

We finally made it through, and two of the primary engineers on the project put in their two weeks. I laughed and wished them well, and then I realized that this 1:1 with my boss that just popped up is likely him passing ownership of the project to me. At which point, I will also put in my two weeks. We have 11 engineers total; Teams single-handedly killed a quarter of our product development team. If you're ever asked to work on Teams; RUN (if you can). If you're ever asked to use Teams; RUN (if you can). It is deeply cursed; it is fundamentally, to its core, anti-user, anti-developer, and only benefits Microsoft and the so-called "Global AD Administrators". If Teams had existed in 1949, there'd be a page in the Geneva Conventions categorizing it as a Weapon of Mass Destruction and banning its use during wartime.

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

#29

Post by KingMachiavelli »

So if your work can be surmised by your activity on teams then sure teams provides those metrics too your boss. If your work and your teams usage are not closely correlated then it does not.

Tbh this is not that concerning. Teams is a desktop application it could report computer usage by the minute. It could send a list of applications you use and how much, and probably your browser history (unless that's encrypted). Etc. It could be a lot worse.

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

#30

Post by naikrovek »

AnonC wrote: post #27
Spooky23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams provides minimum viable EDiscovery unless you buy a separate service. Good luck reconstructing conversations without it!

Thanks. I didn’t know that. Wouldn’t larger organizations (if not medium sized ones or small ones) want to have that service anyway?

It's funny because you were talking like you knew it all, then someone with real world knowledge of Teams gave you info invalidating the key point of your argument and you just shrug it off with more assumptions.

It's the entire Hacker News culture completely and wholly represented in three succinct comments.

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