Microsoft Creating Omniscient Worker Database
By: The Joe De Vivre
Tags: Surveillance, Corporate Culture, Cybersecurity, Tech, Big Data

Leading us into the surveillance state dystopia where employers trade worker’s metadata

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

This year we have experienced a historic shift towards remote work. This could, potentially, be a liberating and revolutionary change. However, as the lines between labour and leisure time-space become increasingly blurred, we encounter a host of new problems to solve. We would all accept the reality of a boss observing a worker in the office, but the notion of an employer having eyes and ears on an employee outside of the workspace is somewhat disturbing. When does a remote worker clock out?

Keeping employee track records is not new. To make someone ‘Employee of the month’, logically there must be some kind of data comparisons going on. Things are different now though. Rather than the eye test or judgements of character made by employers previously, workers are now subject to intense scrutiny. The sheer amount of worker data being captured, archived and traded makes the contemporary process of employee comparison rather inhumane and frankly dystopian.

A recent and notably chilling demonstration of this paradigm is Microsoft’s implementation of ‘Productivity Scores’ into the company’s new Office 365. The workplace analytics feature gives employees ratings based on ‘Communication, Meetings, Content Collaboration, Teamwork and Mobility’. In order to calculate these scores, Microsoft takes in a large array of metadata from workers’ use of their software. It includes their names, the company and department they work for, the state and city they work in, the number of days they spent as a creator, the number of days they spent as a reader, the number of files they created, the files they shared internally, the files they shared externally, the files they emailed, the days they communicated via email, the days they communicated via team chats, the days they communicated via Skype and if they used Microsoft services on the web, mobile or desktop.

Microsoft calls its surveillance apparatus ‘A new service that can help accelerate your digital transformation by providing insights into how your organisation works’. Tens of millions of workers use Microsoft’s services. The metadata collected by Microsoft is then made accessible to employers as Microsoft allows other companies to share employee data between themselves.

Microsoft is attempting to distance itself from the utilisation of Office as a surveillance tool. However the default setting is for Microsoft to display identities with the data. They know what they are doing. Microsoft does not inform employees about the kind of data that is being extracted from them as they use Office to work. They let the corporations decide if they want to do this — and we all know what their decisions will be. Forbes reported that ‘According to Market Research Future, the workplace monitoring industry is projected to grow to a $3.84 billion’ market value by 2023’. This is due to the Covid-19 driven rise in remote work and the fact that companies like Microsoft are capitalising on employers’ desire for power and knowledge over employees.

As employees are moving out of the office, the employers’ apparatus to spy on them is growing at an exponential rate.

Wolfie Christl believes that companies like Microsoft are ‘Providing the tools’ for these insidious ‘Practices we know from software development — and factories and call centres’, and says they will soon be ‘Expanded to all white-collar work’. As workers across all industries find themselves morphing into remote workers, we are going to find ourselves in a society in which Big Tech provides an enormous database which employers can use to spy on citizens / potential employees. Rather than conducting a 15 minute interview to see if someone is suitable for their company, employers will have a perverse ability to sift through candidate archives to see if they are going to cause any trouble. Nobody wants to employ a thief, understandably. But what about workers who may have shown a tendency to support other workers? What about people who support unions?

There has always been overlap between working relationships and regular relationships with other people. When we spend at least 5 days a week working with others it is only natural that we befriend some of them. With this in mind, what are the implications of metadata hoarding that tracks who we have been emailing, messaging and sharing files with?

Amazon has already been caught using it’s employee surveillance data to dilute hotspots of union-supporting employees. The power of the general public is derived from our sheer strength in numbers, when we are united. If employers are able to keep us apart by by surveilling for potential troublemakers/unifiers , then the power imbalance is only going to worsen.

The potential for negative societal change is huge. Workers who have shown populist inclinations will undoubtedly face repercussions as employers seek to avoid them. Not only that, but anyone whose dataset shows a close relationship with them will also face intensified scrutiny. As the surveillance becomes ubiquitous, human behaviour will alter in a manner which reflects our knowledge that we are being watched by employers. Employers do not want free thinkers and activists. Employers want conformity and allaying subservience.

To maintain human integrity, curiosity and the desire to always improve our society we must reject the surveillance state. We do not want to shape ourselves into what is desirable for our corporate masters.