Security News > 2020 > December > Productivity Score: Microsoft limits features of new tool following 'workplace surveillance' concerns
Microsoft has dialed back components of its Productivity Score tool for Microsoft 365 apps following concerns about user privacy.
Called Productivity Score, the tool assigns each 365 user in an organization a score out of 100 across categories including communication, meetings, collaboration and teamwork - which can be viewed by admins.
Critics argued that Productivity Score was essentially a workplace surveillance tool that would allow organizations to keep tabs on how often individual employees did things like send email and engaged with chats on Microsoft Teams.
Spataro said: "Productivity Score produces a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users. We'll make that clearer in the user interface and improve our privacy disclosures in the product to ensure that IT admins know exactly what we do and don't track."
Going forward, organizations won't be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how individual users are using Microsoft 365 services, Spataro added.