I know this will sound paranoid as fuck, but I’ve really been thinking about Microsoft lately. Like, they’re pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not. The fact that it even made it past the concept stage tells me that no one at Microsoft gives a single fuck about their users anymore. The final shreds of any trust I had in them as a company are gone and I’ve started thinking of them as an adversary.
Today I was considering Teams in particular. My company has been using it for maybe six years. When our email provider went teats up, I did some research and realized we had Microsoft cloud stuff included in our Action Pack subscription. We started using their email, and about the same time we started using Teams.
Teams offers EEE but only on Teams Premium, which we don’t pay extra for. Microsoft has access to every message and chat. They could be saving transcripts and voice calls. They might have accumulated billions of hours of voice data by now.
What could they do with all this data?
- Sell to LEO
- Commit corporate espionage
- Gather government secrets
- Use for AI training
Something else just occurred to me. I did research a while back on the software stacks that big tech companies use. Not one uses IIS.
I’ve been a Windows developer for thirty years. I used to like Microsoft. I looked forward to new versions of Windows and Visual Studio. Now I feel like they’ve lured us all in slowly until we put our throats in their jaws. Fucking mental.
Talk me down, if you can.
Given the ease of implantation of end to end encryption now, it’s a reasonable assumption that anything not e2ee is being data mined. E2ee has extensive security benefits, for example even if your data is dumped the info is still useless. So, there has to be a compelling reason to not use it.
Teams is absolutely used already or going to be used to train AI. Probably already has been used in corporate espionage. And yes, IIS is a steaming pile of shit compared to the alternatives. It’s really only even entertained as an option at smaller businesses in my experience.
Teams is absolutely used already or going to be used to train AI.
It is, it’s already doing transcripts and summaries / meeting minutes in the corpo I work in. I’m astonished how much they trust and rely on Microsoft services without giving it a second thought.
I work with our complianceand privacy attorneys and the contracts we maintain protect our data, state it is ours, and guarantees it is not used to train on ai.
I hate ms as much as anyone hear but it is misguided to think no one is protecting your or your companies intersects.
The contract only works if Microsoft complies with it.
Why wouldn’t they, they don’t care and are unlikely to get caught stealing the data the agreed not to steal. How are you going to find out, how are you then going to sue them and how are you going to replace the services. The reality is most businesses won’t find out, they won’t sue if they do and they’ll continue using Microsoft services.
They are a corporation. They exist to make money for ahareholders. The reputational harm of mass surveiling their peer corpos is colossal. Sure, their could absolutely be a rouge individual and we see it time and time again, but mass scale hovering of another companies IP? Nah, expecting that borders conspiracy.
Microsoft and their business practices are shit. It is very much a take it or leave it scenerio. Amazon, the competition, just went all in on M365 services for their operations. You expect that MS is actively stealing their data to enrich themselves. Sure, possible. Their teck would allow it, but I bet the service contract mandates consent and observation anytime an MS agent engages with Amazon’s deployment. And I’d bet it all they honor that contract.
Why risk everything on spying? They are doing just fine sucking up the publics data when contracts aren’t in place. Individuals should stay the fuck away but big coropos is another game entirely
On a related note, within the past year microshit made it so you can’t join a teams meeting on their android app unless you give it permission to see your phone number
@sgibson5150 all valid points and the business practice they employed many times before. Embrace, extend, and extinguish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
They’re not “pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not”, they’re explicitly making it opt-in. They gave a fuck about their users’ complaints and made a bunch of modifications to it.
You may still not like it, but give them some credit.
They are forcing it again later this year
No, it’s opt-in. If you do nothing you won’t have it.
For now
Just like it is stored locally, for now.
Microsoft has a funny habit of turning things on with updates
Dude, think of what you’re saying. Recall is baked into the OS. In this day and age there’s a huge chance, almost a certainty, that the only options are to “opt-in” and know all your interactions are being funneled and mined, or don’t, and you don’t know, but it’s still happening.
How are you going to audit it? Most Windows users have no idea how to audit what happens in their network, most humans don’t have a way to look into what MS software is doing because there’s no access to the code.
Yeah, I’ll keep giving them the credit they deserve, which is being sure thay are doing whatever they want whether you know it or not.
Corporations will notice extra data over their network, etc and act as an unofficial audit. That’s also the way problems with updates generally get found.
They gave a fuck about negative pr
sorry to hear about the stockholm syndrome
Underrated comment
I suppose pointing out MS also owns linkedin isn’t the talk down you’re looking for?
If you’re a dev, this along with GitHub, and your employer using teams, is a pretty severe panopticon.
Down? You’re only going to get talked up here.
Wait till your average desktop computer has enough power to train models. Every single application out there will have a trained model and everything you’ve ever written or done. The train data set is tiny they could have it easily uploaded and then query it for marketing data against you.
AIs lossy compression is astounding, and it’s level of error is absolutely no big deal for marketing.
Yeah, just as Zoom.
Jotsi for the win! And also Big Blue Button, for certain settings that may be better.
…because Zoom is much better…
Jitsu isn’t bad but it isn’t e2e and only really works for one time meetings. Better to use Nextcloud talk, Rocket chat, Mattermost or even Matrix
Sorry but I can’t believe a single word that zoom tells about security, so in my point Jitsi will always be more secure. To me it’s just the same as google and facebook preaching about how private they are, and how much control did they give you over your data. Yeah, sure.
Also, why do you think it only works for one time meetings? If you mean that settings get reset when everyone leaves, and anyone can kick anyone, it can be setup to have permanent access control, even with their free service.
There are better options that Jitsi. Jitsi doesn’t allow for text chats outside of an active meeting
Sell to LEO
Low Earth Orbit? I hate TLAs
Oh sorry I meant law enforcement. Not sure what my dumb ass was trying to abbreviate there.
Law Enforcement Organizations, it’s a valid initialism
I always read it as Law Enforcement Officer
What makes you hate tiny little ants?
They’ve already given away that they use teams to track stuff. I forget the context, but some teams person said that they get less activity after 3:30 in the context of some article about working from home. Revealed that they were tracking mouse usage with teams indirectly.
It’s called Microsoft Clarity, and yes, Teams does it https://clarity.microsoft.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_replay
All I can do is talk you up. I think it’s a lot worse than what you’ve highlighted.
For real. We already know Microsoft is a leader in data collection, economic espionage, and surveillance capitalism. We know for a fact they gave secret police real-time backdoors into their systems and all data they hold the encryption keys to.
Oh you have no idea how deep my paranoia on this goes! We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 at my office, MS made software that manages your entire business from the accounting ledgers on out. Copilot AI is everywhere in it, trying to encourage you to teach it how to do things.
MS wants to offer the next generation of knowledge worker. No more accountants, no more senior managers of inventories and all those many miscellaneous titles it takes to run a company. Certainly no more technical support. AI is going to do it all. MS wants to tell every business how to do business.
When you say billions of hours, I would keep things in perspective. AI and storage aren’t free. They’ll only save the important stuff. The solution to saving yourself, us, and all of humanity is to never do anything important or useful. So the good news is if we go back to work and slack off as we’ve always done, we’ll outsmart them and save us all!
I’m sorry. It came out years ago that Win 10 keylogged and told home all about it (justified as to improve our predictive typing software ) even though there were no promises in the ToS to limit its spyware use, I screamed about how the fucking sky is fucking falling, and now Windows 10 is in bunches of US businesses, and more than a few outside the US. It even says in the EULA MS will snitch on you to law enforcement about anything it feels like.
So yeah, all the people who have legitimate businesses that have real secrets (and break laws as a matter of course) have all wittingly chosen to give Microsoft all the biographical leverage MS needs to take over the world. (Some companies actually got their tech teams to defang the Win10 spyware. But more didn’t than did.)
Now I’m one of those 1960s hippies who screamed about the rising police state in the US to whom no one listened. Another Cassandra crying like a bainsidhe into the wind.
I lost the trust with windows 8 :)
I lost the trust with MS DOS.
I lost trust with MS-BASIC
