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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

#91

Post by simonh »

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…

Teams may be based on Skype tech under the hood, but the Skype desktop and mobile apps are garbage fires in comparison.

I regularly get messages come through to Skype mobile but not desktop even when I'm working on my desktop, the mobile app seems to need to crash and restart frequently, it's slow and unreliable responding to incoming calls which often get dropped, when they come to the app at all. Having said that now my organisation has decided to move decisively to teams, it's suddenly becoming unreliable. Maybe having trouble coping with increased usage. Maybe that was the problem with Skype too.

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

#92

Post by adrian_b »

gonzo41 wrote: post #24
leipert wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am using a second account, configured differently, like you recommend, as this is the simplest solution.

For even better isolation, a virtual machine could be used, instead of a second computer.

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

#93

Post by HenryBemis »

m463 wrote: post #88
gnicholas wrote: post #47

I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then im…

I think I ran into this when I first used it, and tried disabling it, but then I just uninstalled it and exclusively use the browser version. I can't recall exactly what I did, it was a while back. I think one way to combat things like this is to find the launch file disable it and make it unwritable. chflags +simmutable Other possibilities are: zero out files and make them immutable, or make the directory for update…

> but then I just uninstalled it and exclusively use the browser version.

I had a couple of interviews with a bank and they wanted me to use Teams. I fell through the trap of installing it. Then (by default) plugged itself on my start-up list. "Join by browser" is the best option.

As or the tool, I use from SysInternals the Autoruns.exe. I love this toolkit (for a couple of decades now), I always suggest people to download the SysInternals Suite, cool small exe tools.

Edit: adding the download site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...

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

#94

Post by zokier »

gonzo41 wrote: post #24
leipert wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> your working from home, don't do it from your own computer. do it from a computer work provides

Wait, is this something that needs even saying?! Are people relly BYODing personal laptops too? Why? It would not even cross my mind to use personal computer to touch work stuff with ten foot pole.

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

#95

Post by russellendicott »

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…

Have you noticed that you can't copy and paste all the text from a conversation?

At least the feature request has 2900 upvotes.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

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

#96

Post by chaostheory »

The thing I hate the most about Teams is how it shows you as idle within what seems like 30 seconds vs only going idle once your machine starts to sleep. There’s no way to configure this as an end user. I really started hating Teams with a passion after that. MS is losing the goodwill from Nadella rise to the CEO seat

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

#98

Post by resynth1943 »

IMHO Teams isn't as good as they make out. Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls, alongside the blocking modals which stop you from editing documents. Moreover, the UI is a slow mess.

I guess the most attractive point for employers is that this is free for 0365 consumers, but O365 isn't that good either IMHO.

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

#99

Post by grishka »

m463 wrote: post #88
gnicholas wrote: post #47

I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then im…

I think I ran into this when I first used it, and tried disabling it, but then I just uninstalled it and exclusively use the browser version. I can't recall exactly what I did, it was a while back. I think one way to combat things like this is to find the launch file disable it and make it unwritable. chflags +simmutable Other possibilities are: zero out files and make them immutable, or make the directory for update…

I did another variation of this for the Chrome updater. I deleted its plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and created the directories with the same names so it can't easily overwrite them.

Honestly, it's frustrating that installing a daemon doesn't require user consent. Apple doesn't have their priorities right — instead of this legitimately useful feature, they added these annoying runtime permissions for the subdirectories in your home directory.

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

#100

Post by varispeed »

Teams is a menace, just like IE 6.0 was. Apart from being essentially a spyware it is also chewing resources like an old locomotive, at least on Linux. It's interesting that they put so much focus on tracking, but actual usability is in dire straits. They even dared to push this crap in my Windows machine without my consent. I think the problem is that such tracking of employees is largely unregulated, so greedy execs are milking the situation while they can to stroke their egos and count those beans. Unfortunately it seems like the unions or even workers themselves are not so concerned about this. When I told my colleagues about it, they said "so what, we are tracked everywhere anyway".
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