Microsoft introduces ways of detecting “leavers” in email
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Hah, creepy technology. I suppose they could do a lot more, like using metrics to measure productivity, and if it's below what the employee usually has, then, maybe they've lost motivation.
Well nothing to worry about then.
> And employees are opted in without any notice from their employer
[edit] Obviously professional communication channels are monitored, but it would still be nice to be informed when policies change. (Anyhow, personal and professional communications should always be kept separate to avoid this issue)
That’s weasel talk. Opt in means you get to choose if you want it.
They’re turning it on by default and not telling people.
This is the most bullshit thing Microsoft has done in decades.
And also be aware that the 'watercooler' conversation has been replaced with digital forms over the last 2 years, meaning a look over your shoulder to see who's within earshot is no longer sufficient. And it's not always obvious that someone (or something, in this case) may be watching.
In the last 2 years most of my comms with my colleagues went from 90% face to face to 80% digital. Big difference. And it's not healthy either to not talk about frustrations at work.
Now I'm in the position to make this call for my org and I wouldn't use it.
This is a tool for org admins, this isn't MS being evil. If your company uses it, be pissed at them if you so choose, not MS.
It’s like people who write spam software who say “it’s really up to spammers who choose to use this software, don’t blame us.”
There’s really not a positive reason to identify “leavers.” Their data exfoliation reason is bogus and should be prevented by other reasons anyway.
Take your tinfoil hat off and get outside.
The false positive risk is more harmful than any benefit gained.
The odds of “I read your email and saw you’re thinking of leaving so here’s a raise” working are negligible.
This seems like a way for someone to waste time on thinking they know something useful.
I’d love to see how frequently people talk about this and leave. I expect there’s dozens or hundreds of instance of people who apply for a job or network looking for jobs vs people who leave. There’s no published data on identified leavers who leave so that’s where my assumption that this is garbage data.
This barrier exists for a reason. It will only make coworkers more fake because they will watch more what they say. A panopticon is never good.
PS: If my work starts using this I will start doing a "compliance bingo", to try and trigger as many detections as I can every day :) And I will say so publicly.
Such human relationships may include banter which may be about how you might like the look of the canteen girl, about frustration at processes, about going for dinner with a vendor.
All things which would be flagged under this. This is not your regular "personal use" web usage monitoring which we've all come to loathe.
I would never put anything like that in email, or even say it in a teams call.
“Never write a letter, and never destroy one.” - Cardinal Richelieu
Companies shouldn't be able to access 1:1 correspondence between employees without some kind of complex legal process first, IMO.
As I've seen communication compliance used, the leaver policy is enabled when a person is marked within an HR system as leaving the company, or when their Active Directory account is disabled. If certain sequences of activity occur such as downloading lots of files from SharePoint and they are copied to a USB drive or to an external file share, or if a file previously owned by the leaving employee is accessed after the AD account is disabled by an external user, it fires off an alert.
I'm skeptical about the value of the use of a "classifier" given that there isn't much documentation that explains how it works, how it's trained, and any documented workflow to statistically validate the model. Instead of using "classifiers" you can create custom policies based around keywords, regex patterns, or targeting sequences such as download x # of files then copy then delete. I think it would be interesting if you could build a custom classifier using your own positive and negative examples, define your own score thresholds, train models around specific excerpts rather than on entire emails, and test the classifier using a set of human reviewed data.
Regardless though - I'm far less suspicious of the general idea that companies are focused on "inside threats" than whether they understand how things work. Machine learning algorithms are basically just fancy text searching backed by statistical analysis but there are a lot of input variables and also a few different ways to defensibly measure the performance of the tools. The M365 tool doesn't expose much of that and a lot of compliance teams are probably going to be concerned about wasting time chasing false positives.
It’s weird how there is no predicted accuracy and no SLA or any measure to hold it to. So should be a frustrating time using the information properly. I assume smart people will ignore the results and idiots will think it means someone will leave.
Edit: Nope, luckily not. It's part of Microsoft Purview, which is an add-on to M365 by the looks of it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/microsoft-... . At least it's not going to bother everyone that uses M365. It probably costs a lot to add on too. Meaning our company will probably not use it. Phew.
But whoever's employer does buy this are now constantly going to be scanned for potential malicious activity at work. Sounds like a scene from The Circle, or worse, The Every. Where the characters constantly have to express how happy they are and how aligned with the company because they're insta-fired if they're in the bottom 10%. This was meant to be a work of fiction. 1984 was not a manual, Microsoft.
When Microsoft started their data farming with office insights "purely anonymous and intended to help increase your personal performance!!" I always knew it was a way of introducing much worse. But I didn't imagine they'd go this far this quickly, I assumed they'd just use all the data for marketing and misguided employee performance metrics. I say "misguided" since Office insights used the same "healthy" metrics for online meeting hours, concentration hours etc regardless of employees' roles, which obviously differ greatly in the type of work and amount of collaboration. I'm not sure if it still does this by the way, as I turned it off after the first weeks. Which by the way doesn't stop it collecting data, it just stops emailing me about it.
It's a totally different thing to accuse employees of wrongdoing based on AI algorithms though.
Imagine saying something like "oh god what a day, I hate this place" in a private teams chat after a frustrating meeting. +1 potential leaver point. Or "hey I hope they're going to give us some nice goodies at that event!". +1 suspicious gifts point. A few more points and way to go, you're on the HR shitlist. Sure, Microsoft recommend an "explicitly opted-in investigator" looks at it but who has time to spare these days. It'll just end up a metric on an excel sheet somewhere.
I'm sure the data will be "anonymised" but this will probably mean that it will be averaged across a team. Since most of our teams are really small, it's really not that anonymous. And in fact, it makes it even harder to disprove, a low 'leaver' score might be caused by one colleague and put a dark shade over the entire team.
I really don't like this at all. I understand that corporate comms tools are not meant to be private. But to me that means someone could look at it in the case of major transgressions. Not to constantly look at it and weigh every word in search of things which aren't even transgressions (as far as I recall, wanting to leave an organisation is still legal).
PS: Also... "usernames are pseudonymized by default". What do you mean "by default"???, so it can be switched off to not pseudonymise?
I really wonder how legal this is in the EU, especially stricter countries like Germany.
The analyst can also open up an investigation in the eDiscovery module, which prevents the documents from being deleted and allows attorneys or analysts to perform additional searching and tagging. The username, mailbox, and other metadata is not masked in eDiscovery, and so in order to access the investigation someone would need additional permissions.
The upshot though is that even if the classifier detects a message, a human analyst would need to decide how to tag the message, and the decision for how to do so would need to be done according to a defensible policy.
To your concern about not having to look at every word/message - it's less invasive to only investigate targeted communications than to read every message, or sample a fixed number or percentage of messages. I'm not entirely convinced that a ML approach is that much more useful than having a list of risk keywords because there isn't an easy way to measure and tune to the percentage of true positives detected or how many false positives you need to review to find true positives.
Supervised machine learning like this is used pretty regularly during lawsuits to make the exchange of information more efficient but when people use an algorithm to avoid reviewing documents there is typically a process to demonstrate within a certain confidence level and margin of error that the relevant documents have been produced. But if used in a corporate investigation where you would want a higher confidence level and lower margin of error. And to get a higher statistical degree of confidence you need to review more.
I can understand some industries might need it for some compliance thing. Law enforcement perhaps. But really some of the things that MS are tagging are completely arbitrary. Just the way you might want to leave, this is not something that could ever be associated with any kind of governmental compliance. It is simply not wrongdoing at all nor any indication of it.
I work closely with our insider threat team and they don't do anything preventative like this. They just investigate when allegations have been raised, and even then they are really hands-off in terms of internal comms. They have to get special permission to access that, showing proof of the allegations. They behave like the police would, get explicit permissions (akin to a warrant in law enforcement).
The process you describe is more akin to what an intelligence organisation would do, with dragnet surveillance. Totally not acceptable in a business environment IMO.
"Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale"
"Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"
-- https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for meDear company IT spy overlords, my use of LeetCode is exclusively to learn new interviewing techniques to help me bring in only the best of the best to our amazing company! /s
Their claim that employees intending to leave "may put the organization at risk of malicious or inadvertent data exfiltration upon departure" is, cynically, corporate bs; but data theft or vandalism isn't entirely unheard of by departing employees.
Ever moved your source code to a thumb driver before you left your job, even though your contract technically forbids it, you've signed away the IP rights, etc?
We have detected overly negative language in your correspondence that we have correlated with being a danger to yourself or others. Due to this we have decided to terminate your employment immediately. Please find attached references to local psychiatrists that may be able to help you with your reeducation. Have a nice day!