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I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users

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

#151

Post by jdbernard »

oblio wrote: post #119
jdbernard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same setup, except three laptops: personal, company-provided, client/project-provided. You would think it would be unmanageable and you'd be right we're it not for Synergy ( https://symless.com/synergy ). I've got two laptops docked and connected to external monitors. Synergy lets me use just one keyboard and mouse for all three at the same time. Makes it feel like they're just three adjacent screens on one PC. But b…

I imagine if the work laptop is 24/7 connected to a VPN, then this tool doesn't work.

Depends on the network filtering done by the company.

I have my router setup with port-forwarding for the Synergy protocol. Combined with stable IP addresses internally on my network and dynamic DNS pointing to my home network, I am able to use this tool even when the client machine is on VPN.

Of course, it's important to realize that by doing this you are sending keystrokes across the internet, so it's important to enable the option in Synergy to encrypt the traffic.

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

#152

Post by CharlesW »

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…

> …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.

In your Teams profile settings, have you also unchecked Settings > General > Auto-start application?

(I'm not saying that Teams shouldn't use "Login Items" as the source of truth on this, just that Microsoft provides its own setting for this.)

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

#153

Post by leipert »

2rsf wrote: post #79
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…

> separate subnet Why ? theoretically you have a point, but practically which company would spy on your network ? I totally understand, and agree to some degree, a company protecting its assets and tracking what their employees are doing but it's not the same as putting a general spyware.

It’s not about that I don’t trust my company. I just don’t necessarily trust the software I need to use for a job.

For example if it has some device management software, or some VPN clients or whatnot installed, this increases the attack surface.

Also „leipert“-private might be boring for targeted attacks. But „leipert“-corporate might be interesting, if someone owns my private network OR my work computer, it might have an impact on the other.

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

#154

Post by resynth1943 »

alkonaut wrote: post #133
resynth1943 wrote: post #98

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.

> Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.

They're prompts you get when you have three Teams tabs open at the same time. When you click them, it refreshes the current tab. Kicked me out of calls a couple of times.

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

#155

Post by keeganpoppen »

csunbird wrote: post #83
keeganpoppen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apps in windows are, and have always been, more like this than mac apps. it seems like the worst offenders on mac are ports from / native residents of windows. steam does this, for example. it drives me BONKERS. at least on Mac it's kind of rare. on windows, i swear to god every single thing you install does this. razer mouse? better run at startup! weird USB peripheral you use once in a blue moon? better run at star…

I feel like steam is a good citizen in this regard. I had no problem with it starting at startup/login after I asked it not to do that.

i thought so too, but for some reason on my macbook air it keeps starting at login lol. i wouldn't be surprised if it's PEBKAC, honestly...

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

#156

Post by alkonaut »

resynth1943 wrote: post #154
alkonaut wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.

They're prompts you get when you have three Teams tabs open at the same time. When you click them, it refreshes the current tab. Kicked me out of calls a couple of times.

What are "Teams tabs"? Are you using some kind of browser based version of Teams?

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

#157

Post by resynth1943 »

alkonaut wrote: post #156
resynth1943 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're prompts you get when you have three Teams tabs open at the same time. When you click them, it refreshes the current tab. Kicked me out of calls a couple of times.

What are "Teams tabs"? Are you using some kind of browser based version of Teams?

Yeah. Privacy reasons.

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

#158

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

> "All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is."

Oh pssht, humans can't notice a response time of less than 2 seconds. Plus performance doesn't matter at all because you can add it later if you need it, which you don't. Anyway, you can't say it's slow until you've measured it and you can't complain until you have a fix. Besides, it's more important that the code is readable because it will be read much more often than it will be written. And furthermore, if you re-run the same thing a few times to warm the JIT up, discount startup time, ignore input and output time and network lag because they are external to the system and only measure the core function runtime, you'll find it's ackshually really fast (if you buy new hardware which is ifine because +$2000 computer spend is cheaper than developer time). And does a few seconds really matter, what were you going to do with that 10 seconds of response time, read a book or something? Slow? What do you mean "slow", launch time, hover response, switching response, time to finish redrawing a page? There's many things happening and you can't complain unless you narrow down exactly which specific sub-millisecond behaviour is taking too long for you - none of them? thought not.

Stop questioning the dogma, hush.

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

#159

Post by jodrellblank »

015a wrote: post #58
propogandist wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good intel. They've been throwing throwing in Teams as a free service and building a massive enterprise moat that will be impossible to disrupt. Slack, which started out with a NY Times full page advert welcoming Microsoft Teams, ran to Salesforce unable to compete. Imagine Microsoft being able to connect your Teams activity, Edge browser activity and Windows 10 usage to your linkedin profile, github profile (all own…

The only reason I'm not bullish on Microsoft is because I don't know where else they can expand to. Teams is growing in Microsoft shops. There are a LOT of these; if these shops had real-time chat, it took the form of either something like Skype (useless) or a half-dozen siloed Slack servers started by employees (no company-wide benefit). So, they add on Teams; usually its already in the plan they're paying for. Sudd…

> "Yeah, Azure/365. What else do they have? Windows is more and more irrelevant. Browser; lost the war. Github; an expensive side-business. Xbox; a billion dollar money pit with their leaders at the top praying for Halo Infinite. Consumer hardware; nothing."

I started to copy chunks out of their 2020 Q1 and 2020 Q4 earnings reports, but there's too much. If you genuinely think their revenue was significantly from Internet Explorer, that nobody really uses GitHub, that Azure is a few virtual machines, and they have nothing else - you should skim read them[1][2]. Here are some excerpts:

"record Xbox Live monthly active users, console, mobile and PC. Ten years in, Minecraft is stronger than ever, with record revenue and usage". Money pit? Cash cow.

"GitHub has grown, up more than 30 percent since our acquisition a year ago. And more than 2 million organizations use GitHub" in Q1 followed by "3 million organizations using GitHub" by Q4. "The state of California is using GitHub and Azure DevOps to power 90 percent of its digital COVID-19 response infrastructure. All 5,000 engineers at Autodesk rely on GitHub to break down silos across the organization. And, at Etsy, developers are using GitHub to deploy to production more than 50 times per day", "At Ford Motor Company alone, 8,000 employees use GitHub". An "expensive side project" giving them huge growth and a foot-in, or extended lock-in, at a ton of companies.

"Azure Active Directory Premium, used by more than 100,000 organizations" in Q1 followed by "used by 200,000 organizations" by Q4.

"partnership with SAP, making Azure the preferred destination for every SAP customer." (SAP is a huge enterprise company and has 400k business customers).

"LinkedIn revenue increased 25 percent" in Q1, and by Q4 "Content shared was up nearly 50 percent year over year, and LinkedIn Live streams were up 89 percent since March. Professionals watched nearly four times the amount of LinkedIn Learning content in June than they did a year ago".

"sixty-nine organizations now have more than 100,000 users of Teams, and over 1800 organizations have more than ten thousand users of Teams."

"Power Platform already has more than 2.5 million monthly active citizen developers."; "Power Apps monthly active users increased 170 percent year over year."

"OEM Pro revenue grew 19 percent, ahead of the commercial PC market, driven by strong Windows 10 demand", "on-premises server business grew 12 percent".

"96 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Power BI to find insights in their data." up from 84% in Q1.

"our commercial cloud, which surpassed $50 billion in revenue for the first time – up 36 percent year over year"

"In June alone, 13.5 billion transactions were processed in Azure Cognitive Services. 2.5 billion messages sent. 9 million hours of speech transcribed"

"material growth in the number of $10 million plus Azure contracts" in both Q1 and Q4.

In Q4 "Commercial cloud revenue grew 30 percent. Office 365 commercial revenue grew 19 percent. LinkedIn revenue increased 10 percent. In Surface, revenue grew 28 percent. In Windows, overall OEM revenue grew 7 percent. Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 9 percent. Azure revenue grew 47 percent. Per-user business, growth continued to moderate given the size of our enterprise mobility installed base, which grew 26 percent to over 147 million seats. In Gaming, revenue increased 64 percent."

[1] https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....

[2] https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....

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

#160

Post by jodrellblank »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #29

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).…

Microsoft already try to collect your browser history in several places, if you don't turn it off.

In the Windows 10 setup screen, this dialog[1] includes "Use page prediction [...] your browsing data will be sent to Microsoft".

In Windows 10 settings, look for "Activity History" setting, "by sending Microsoft your activity history, including info about websites you browse". This is for y

In "Diagnostics & Feedback" settings, "optional diagnostic data: Send info about websites you browse".

"Improve inking and typing" - send optional inking and typing diagnostic data. Not sure how much typing data that covers.

In the Microsoft Edge browser settings (new Edge/Chromium), "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen - Help protect me from malicious sites and downloads with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen." which could be done with a local database like Chrome does, but I don't think it is, e.g. this website[2] says "The SmartScreen filter works by checking each website you visit and each file you try to download and run. It sends some quick information about them to Microsoft’s Windows Defender SmartScreen servers."

Navigation helpers: "if a website can't be found, the web address will be sent to Microsoft to try to find the correct site." setting catches typos and unavailable LAN servers, and "Show me search and site suggestions using my typed characters" catches your keystrokes in the address bar looking for internal servers and sends them to Bing.

If you sign-in to Edge to sync passwords and favourites between different devices, that includes "other browsing data". [3]

Opt-in part of the Edge Family Features, "Activity reports - See what websites your kids are visiting"

And of course if you signed into Windows with a Microsoft Account to sync your profile to Microsoft, that includes[4] Internet Explorer browsing history, typed URLs, favourites and Edge favourites, typed URLs, reading list.

> "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"

"Optional diagnostic data" in Windows 10 settings already covers "how you use apps and features, plus additional info about device activity".

[1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/01/express-s...

[2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-smartscreen-filter-how-...

[3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-t...

[4]

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