I wonder if the team that is tasked with making teams worse has team meetings with the whole team on teams.
This is their promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
Employees arent the ones paying for Teams, so why would they care? Teams could openly market itself as remote work surveillance for employers and they’d gobble that shit up.
I swear people do not understand the point of what microsoft does.
There isn’t a team tasked with making teams worse. They’re tasked with extracting all possible value out of their product. Part of that value is infromation like where you are, what you’re doing, what you’re talking about, what you search for, what you actually do for your job, who is around you, what they talk about, where they are, what they are doing, what they search for, and what they do for their job and how everyone spends their money.
All of this is incredibly valuable data to governments, businesses and private individuals that want to advertise, suppress dissenting political voices, enhance useful dissenting political voices, and otherwise manipulate global influence.
They just don’t want you to think about declining any permissions, triggering regulatory action, or switching to another platform.
That’s true. Their mission is not explicitly to make it worse, but to continually maximize value at all costs. Eventually, software usability has to be one of the costs.
”Eventually”
As if Teams was ever a usable product.
Same thing with extra steps.
Which is what LinkedIn is for by the way. In terms of data gathering. And to keep you on the platform.
The various news sites out there that want to spread their own version of influence and generate their own revenue take this kind of information and use it to see how you click on things, what drives your engagement, what you will go on to share with others, and how you talk about all of it. It’s all tied together.
Big money interests run basically everything in this world. We are just cattle, we will always be just cattle. I’m in countless databases like all of you, and we’re all fucked by the system we think we might some day to cheat our way above the other rats. The noose is tied tight though… there’s not much room left to struggle. It’s too late to escape it. Palantir and Flock are here to close the loop and they aren’t going anywhere, even if the street cameras are likely to be hidden in the future and more tamper proof rather than obvious to the public. Doesn’t matter if the laws change to ban it or you can convince local government to not get involved with it - it’s way too easy to hide cameras with modern technology. Just give it time and your credit score and auto insurance will incorporate flock data ;)
Insurance is already pushing in-car monitoring for discounts.
They’re already paying all the manufacturers for the driver telemetry anyway, probably through third party brokers because everything must be obfuscated.
I think they like having multiple layers of confirmation that way if one is regulated away for some reason like ‘privacy’ or ‘technically anyone could be driving’ then they have fallbacks and legal deniability for the data being inherently flawed.
My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.
Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)
All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:
The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.
You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?
Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.
They’ve crossed the line a long long time ago. All microslop products are straight up unusable.
Microsoft: Our product is not our software. It’s you!
I’m their software?
Microslop
God damn it, at work they pay us to put that stuff on our personal phones… maybe I’ve been a bit too lenient on that, maybe I should get a work phone.
Never, ever, cross the personal/work barrier. I have seen so much abuse when those lines cross.
I agree, but some places there’s simply no option. I have a state job, they will under no circumstances provide a phone, but you must have Authenticator. If you won’t or can’t use a smartphone, you simply don’t have a job.
State jobs are interesting. 3/4 the pay of a regular job, but job security like none other, and you barely have to do anything. I spend most of my time doing my moonlighting job to supplement my income.
In my company they allow you to use duo key as alternate. I’m guessing your company doesn’t? Could be worth asking.
What if its on your phone work account? That’s totally sandboxed
It seems safer on iPhone than Android. I’d still avoid it due to subpoenas.
I worked on a large(ish) contract (tens of millions) with one of Microsoft’s engineering teams where they were implementing an Azure managed version of software we produced. I would regularly refuse to install teams at the meetings, using teams in-browser only.
It also ensured that the technical project manager had to be the one to transcribe anything in our notes into whatever tools Microsoft was using.
While it was never said, the Microsoft engineers seemed to completely understand and never pushed back against my refusal to a) install crapware and b) not take on work that wasn’t mine.
Not using teams: win win.
There’s a web client. I’ll use that from now on if I have to. Should I use any particular browser that prevents access to WiFi details?
I wonder if the web client can be bookmarked to my desktop with the Teams icon.
firefox or a fork of it, but I would be surprised if teams could read wifi info even in chrome. this is about when you install it as a desktop app, so that it can collect more data and consume more memory than it would otherwise.
I’ve been using web client for work because the app takes seemingly over 50% of my laptop’s resources. Went from waiting 2-3 minutes for Teams to open at the beginning of the day to 10 seconds. Highly recommend.
And the name of that team: Microsoft
The users aren’t the customers. The customers are the users’ bosses.
And or some random dude in procurement.
This is illegal in Norway :)
And Germany.
To be fair, this is barely a feature. If you are on WIFI anyone that really cares knows where you are already
Exactly. I already don’t use the work wifi because they don’t need to know how much I use Lemmy while at work.
you could use a VPN though. protonvpn has measures to work around network restrictions, or set up a wireguard at home, and if they would block it, tell them you need it for work. your own notes related to the trade and your task planning tool stored on your homeserver, or something like that.
but this assumes you work in tech
