IT administrators can also use the administration centre in Microsoft Teams video conference, messaging and collaboration software to assess how long employees spend on calls, how many messages they exchange and how many one-to-one meetings they take part in. This includes not only a list of most of the actions they take, but also the possibility to plainly access all the content being exchanged within the organisation and external communications through email,” it said. “Combining these two all-encompassing features, employers are able to draw a rather intimate picture of every employee, down to the finest of details. Privacy International argues in an article about Demetriades’ research that these tools can be used to build up a detailed profile of an employee. If the email contains attachments or a picture, the employer can see that too,” he said.

For example, they log the time of the email, the recipient and the content of the email. “Whatever interaction is performed through business email, the audit and content search features identify it and log it. Microsoft’s “content search” and “audit” tools can be used by employers to build up a detailed picture of employees’ activities, he told Computer Weekly. The company replaced its reports with aggregated data measuring how much employees were sending email, collaborating on shared documents and taking part in group chats, in a way that was not traceable to individual users.īut research by UCL computer science graduate Demetris Demetriades and Privacy international shows that employers are still able to use functions in Office 365 to monitor individual employees.ĭemetriades found employers can use the governance and risk management tools in Office 365 to look at the content of emails or messages sent by specific employees and identify the activities that individual users have carried out using their work computer.

“The ability for an employer to read all communications and documents, and to access data about employees’ online activities without their knowledge, is one of the most problematic features of Office 365”

Microsoft office for federal employees