Well-Intentioned Analytics Feature Scrutinizes Employees at Work
It has long been known that Microsoft has incorporated numerous "snooping and spying functions" into Windows 10, despite data protection concerns. These analyze your behavior and collect personal data – your data! – at every opportunity. This data is then sent to US servers in Redmond, analyzed, and "who-knows-what" is done with it. So far, so familiar. What's new, however, is that in addition to the operating system, Office 365 software also spies – together with Microsoft Teams – and unfortunately, it does so where you can hardly defend yourself – namely in your company at your workplace. It doesn't matter whether you are in the office or – for example, due to the Corona pandemic (2020 / 2021) – working from home.
Well-intentioned: Optimizing your working hours
Via the MyAnalytics evaluation function within the software, Microsoft sends (supposedly) valuable data on work behavior to employees in a company. It is intended to help employees optimize their daily work, recognize patterns, and save time. Information such as the following is certainly helpful in this monitoring:
- when too many meetings are scheduled in a day at work
- when or at what time an employee should consciously take a break
- how much time is lost when tasks at work are constantly interrupted by calls, emails, etc., and how work could be made more efficient
Flip side: When Office 365 spies at the workplace
In addition to these supposedly helpful tips, Office 365 also collects the following information during monitoring:
- When and how an employee uses Office 365 apps – how long they work on a document
- Who chats and emails with whom; how often and for how long per day
- How long employees take to write/answer emails
- Who cancels how many meetings, who is late how often
- Who uses video conferences – from the company or from home
While this information that Office 365 spies on is strictly confidential – and not accessible to employers, supervisors, the boss, or management – MyAnalytics does offer evaluation options and possibilities that enable analyses at the company level. It cannot be ruled out that employers may draw conclusions about the work methods of individuals.
Because in the reports for management, for example, the following can be seen for the entire team:
- When employees work productively
- The email open rate
- When emails are processed and when emails are sent
- How quickly emails are answered
- Whether meetings start on time / are regularly extended
The primary goal of these evaluations is to identify potential for improvement in the collaboration of all employees. The productivity and performance of employees should also be promoted. The fact that Office 365 simultaneously transmits employees' work methods to the boss during monitoring is the downside of this type of evaluation.
In the default settings, Office 365 and Microsoft 365 are allowed to spy
Employees who do not want to receive the analyses and want to keep their data out of the evaluation must explicitly turn them off. By default, data collection is allowed. To unsubscribe from MyAnalytics, simply go to your dashboard, navigate to System Settings (gear icon), select the "Settings" option under MyAnalytics, and set the slider to "Off." Here you will also find a step-by-step guide from Microsoft on this opt-out (as Microsoft calls it): https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/workplace-analytics/myanalytics/use/opt-out-of-mya
You don't want Office 365 to spy? Then take action.
If you don't want something, you have to actively search for it, find it, and deactivate it somewhere in the system settings: This is very reminiscent of the more than 80 snooping and spying functions in Windows 10. Because these were also all checked by default. Only after a long search could one turn this off and thus regain control over one's own data.
To avoid having to search, we offer a helpful product with the Anti-Spy for Windows 10. With one click, users can deactivate 80 spying functions at once without a long search. Users essentially take care of their own data protection. And should Windows 11 also turn out to be very prone to spying (we don't know that for sure yet), we will certainly offer you a new solution with good protection here as well.
Deactivating MyAnalytics is certainly not as complex and complicated. But even if you have the right and a good reason: Whether it is really advisable for an employee in a company to deactivate the use of these functions is a completely different question.
