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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

#31

Post by Spooky23 »

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?

Depends on upstream regulations and other factors. Financial services have a lot of need in this space, for example.

Otherwise it’s a risk consideration like anything else... is the benefit of “knowing” what’s going on more than the liability? Usually managers in bureaucratic institutions want to know as much as they need to, but no more.

It’s also expensive and not worth it unless you’re bundling it in with M365 E1000

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

#32

Post by _y5hn »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #19

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…

On Mint 20.1, both Teams app and webapp works. Might be dependent on distro/versions. It's still slow and bloated, so I quit it at EOD.

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

#33

Post by adolph »

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 confirmed that at a company town hall once and I asked if that makes that system a hack target. The CISO didn’t seem to understand the vulnerability, as if it were inconceivable that their infrastructure would be targeted to take advantage of their position as mitm.

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

#34

Post by gigel82 »

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…

I wish there was a better solution to this. I tried creating a VM and joining that to the work "services" but HyperV, VirtualBox, etc. all add an audio delay making Teams unusable.

Also tried Barrier and dedicating one monitor to work, but I still can't share/mix the audio so have 2 separate headsets.

I know ideally I'd just use the work computer all the time when "working", but they're VPN-ing all traffic and I occasionally need to read a private email, or do some browsing and would prefer they don't see that traffic.

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

#35

Post by tacticus »

gigel82 wrote: post #34
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…

I wish there was a better solution to this. I tried creating a VM and joining that to the work "services" but HyperV, VirtualBox, etc. all add an audio delay making Teams unusable. Also tried Barrier and dedicating one monitor to work, but I still can't share/mix the audio so have 2 separate headsets. I know ideally I'd just use the work computer all the time when "working", but they're VPN-ing all traffic and I occa…

So my plan for the audio problem is to use a set of raspberry pis with USB-gadget stuff enabled to be a webcam & soundcard then running them as a usb device. The webcam is going to be an RTSP feed (with the microphone audio) from the main system to push it through and pulseaudios network side of things to do speaker\headphone out.

it's a bit complex for what i need but it should work well.

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

#36

Post by skeeter2020 »

p1necone wrote: post #22
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…

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

From your personal machine? Do you ever check your email via a web interface on your own box? write a quick textfile or document? Log into a web app?

It's really easy to let your work bleed into your personal machine...

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

#37

Post by jdbernard »

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.

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 because they're not I can maintain strict separation between personal and work, and between internal/corporate and client data.

Then, like others have said, I have a fair amount of filtering on the network level.

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

#38

Post by weare138 »

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…

>it’s extremely easy to game this metric.

This reminds me how companies used to rate the performance of programmers based on how many lines of code they produced and why so many companies eventually abandoned this model. All it did was incentivize programmers to quickly hammer out superfluous, inefficient, bug ridden code that would just bite them in the ass later rather than concentrating on writing quality code. I think that's all that would end up happening with MS Teams tracking. Once employees figure out the game, they're just going to spend as much time as they can chatting, posting messages and scheduling pointless meetings rather than doing actual work.

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

#39

Post by masswerk »

I really think, companies should actively inform their team leaders that metrics and scores are not an adequate measure for performance. E.g., a person may have great scores, but is in actuality just micro-managing their incompetence at the cost of everyone else's performance. Metrics may indicate a certain behavior, or they may hint at the opposite, or they may be even somewhat random, as they record just a certain slice of activity, which may or may not be representative and may be of more or less significance to an individual's total work process. Performance is still best judged by performance, that is, output and resource management and, maybe, how much and what kind of irritation a person causes in the given organisation. (Mind that there may be something like positive irritation, as well.) In the light of this, these questionable products are actually quack. (Sorry to have to say so.)

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

#40

Post by speakspokespok »

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.

We all know Synergy and for basic setups it gets the job done. I paid for the v2 Pro license to support them and will keep doing so.

I have moved over though to using Barrier, a synergy-core fork. You get ssl crypto for free, and it fixes some simple but long standing bugs that really annoyed me. Have only used on Mac + Linux for now.

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

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