Microsoft introduces ways of detecting “leavers” in email
What the flying f***.. Is this going to be a standard part of Microsoft 365?<p>Edit: <i>Nope</i>, luckily not. It&#x27;s part of Microsoft Purview, which is an add-on to M365 by the looks of it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;security&#x2F;business&#x2F;microsoft-purview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;security&#x2F;business&#x2F;microsoft-...</a> . At least it&#x27;s not going to bother everyone that uses M365. It probably costs a lot to add on too. Meaning our company will probably not use it. Phew.<p>But whoever&#x27;s employer does buy this are now constantly going to be scanned for potential malicious activity at work. Sounds like a scene from The Circle, or worse, The Every. Where the characters constantly have to express how happy they are and how aligned with the company because they&#x27;re insta-fired if they&#x27;re in the bottom 10%. This was meant to be a work of <i>fiction</i>. 1984 was not a manual, Microsoft.<p>When Microsoft started their data farming with office insights &quot;purely anonymous and intended to help increase your personal performance!!&quot; I always knew it was a way of introducing much worse. But I didn&#x27;t imagine they&#x27;d go this far this quickly, I assumed they&#x27;d just use all the data for marketing and misguided employee performance metrics. I say &quot;misguided&quot; since Office insights used the same &quot;healthy&quot; metrics for online meeting hours, concentration hours etc regardless of employees&#x27; roles, which obviously differ greatly in the type of work and amount of collaboration. I&#x27;m not sure if it still does this by the way, as I turned it off after the first weeks. Which by the way doesn&#x27;t stop it collecting data, it just stops emailing me about it.<p>It&#x27;s a totally different thing to accuse employees of wrongdoing based on AI algorithms though.<p>Imagine saying something like &quot;oh god what a day, I hate this place&quot; in a <i>private</i> teams chat after a frustrating meeting. +1 potential leaver point. Or &quot;hey I hope they&#x27;re going to give us some nice goodies at that event!&quot;. +1 suspicious gifts point. A few more points and way to go, you&#x27;re on the HR shitlist. Sure, Microsoft recommend an &quot;explicitly opted-in investigator&quot; looks at it but who has time to spare these days. It&#x27;ll just end up a metric on an excel sheet somewhere.<p>I&#x27;m sure the data will be &quot;anonymised&quot; but this will probably mean that it will be averaged across a team. Since most of our teams are really small, it&#x27;s really not that anonymous. And in fact, it makes it even harder to disprove, a low &#x27;leaver&#x27; score might be caused by one colleague and put a dark shade over the entire team.<p>I really don&#x27;t like this at all. I understand that corporate comms tools are not meant to be private. But to me that means someone could look at it in the case of major transgressions. Not to <i>constantly</i> look at it and weigh every word in search of things which aren&#x27;t even transgressions (as far as I recall, wanting to leave an organisation is still legal).<p>PS: Also... &quot;usernames are pseudonymized by default&quot;. What do you mean &quot;by default&quot;???, so it can be switched off to not pseudonymise?<p>I really wonder how legal this is in the EU, especially stricter countries like Germany.