“Big Brother” in teleworking
At the company’s October conference, Microsoft announced a new technology that would let people control individual words with their voice. It didn’t catch much traction at first.
Productivity Score was the company that recently filed to patent their technology. Many people criticized it for its parallels to social media. Microsoft faced a lot of criticism for introducing “surveillance features” into their workplace. As many researchers pointed out, the new productivity score actually allowed supervisors to monitor their employees activity especially at teleworking conditions. To note, the monitoring happened when they were working on Microsoft 365.
The tool was first introduced in 2019 but it’s still quite new. It tracks all your work related aspects. Brave examples are the amount of emails you send and how often you’re on conference calls. In this way, your manager can properly track them and incentivize more of these behaviors.
“This is so problematic on so many levels,” tweeted Austrian researcher Wolfie Christl, who was the first to point out the dangers. “Microsoft offers the tools” for even closer monitoring of employees while teleworking. Company X defends its productivity program. Representative from Microsoft responds by saying “the productivity score isn’t a tool for tracking work.”
But Microsoft has been making changes on how AI systems work and recently apologized for their new feature which is heavily flawed. Some people are still not comfortable with the machines learning that much about human behavior, but as time progresses things will get better.
Now Facebook promises to make changes to their service. Spataro said “we also believe that privacy is a human right, and we are focused on ensuring the privacy of every person who uses our products.”
Teleworking is becoming more and more widespread since the pandemic, that is why it is important for the companies and the employees to find balance, between private life and job.
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Author: PC-GR
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