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?

  1. Sell to LEO
  2. Commit corporate espionage
  3. Gather government secrets
  4. 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.

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
    82·
    3 months ago

    All I can do is talk you up. I think it’s a lot worse than what you’ve highlighted.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      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.

  • zelnix@lemmy.ml
    48·
    3 months ago

    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

  • the_weez
    36·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Blizzard@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • mmhmm@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • mmhmm@lemmy.ml
            21·
            3 months ago

            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

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    36·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • tranarchist@lemmy.mlEnglish
    30·
    3 months ago

    > my company feeds all our data to big tech

    > is big tech gonna use that data for malicios purposes?

    there’s your answer

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    29·
    3 months ago

    no one at Microsoft gives a single fuck about their users anymore

    I don’t think they ever did.

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    27·
    3 months ago

    Of course they do. It’s to be expected that big tech companies use all data they can gather for training AIs, tracking users, creating psychological profiles of the users and selling data to the highest bidders.

    Microsoft is also known for creating tools and products which track employees and workers and provide nice looking dashboards and statistics for the employers. And they partner up with Palantir and other companies to create even more effective surveillance solutions for companies and law enforcement to use eventually. MS is a data company since a couple of years, just like Google or Meta is. Data is very valuable.

    In the case of Microsoft Office and Teams, there’s also the issue of corporate espionage. Companies from all over the world are freely giving away sensitive data about their documents, employees and projects to a US-based megacorp. There was a time in history when this would be called corporate espionage which is supposed to be bad and illegal and so on. But, since they’re all doing it voluntarily, and there’s no definite proof of MS doing anything because it’s a black box and no one except MS can inspect what they’re doing, it’s apparently “fine”. It’s like we have collectively become dangerously naive.

    So yeah, it’s all “fine”. Until it isn’t. Until it is revealed one day. Then we can all be shocked and say “how could they do this, how could they violate our trust like that, their marketing slides looked so nice and the consultant was so charming and said we needn’t to worry about anything they would keep our data safe”. Well, if you trusted them in the first place, that’s your mistake. You cannot trust a company like MS, Meta, Google, TikTok, and so on with a huge track record of privacy violations. Ever. Cloud = someone else’s computer. Host your own stuff. Prefer not to use software with proven track records of privacy violations. Don’t use products or services from companies with such track records. Prefer open source over proprietary because when the code is openly auditable that’s a plus for trustworthiness, and proprietary applications usually have a bad track record of privacy violations and other anti-user features, while open source software rarely includes such things.

    And it’s only going to get worse. With upcoming things like Recall, that’s almost like having a permanent camera behind you recording your screen at all times. I feel bad for all Windows users, but on the other hand, I don’t actually have to care. Keep trusting them blindly, but please don’t be surprised when it will come crashing down on you one day.

    • eveninghere@beehaw.org
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yeah. Frankly, if my company gets spied by MS it’s their fault. I don’t care.

      Everything I put in my Teams has been accessible by my company anyway, and so I use that shit accordingly.

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • Elise@beehaw.org
    9·
    3 months ago

    Uhh dude have you ever looked into what types of characters run these companies? You’re just an npc to them.

    Do you really think our current economic system incentivizes good behavior? It’s all about being exploitative, and so it filters out anybody who cares about others. If they don’t, then someone else will. Take a look at starbucks. They don’t pay taxes in for example Germany. If they did, as other coffee shops do, they will go down. So the system dynamics filter out the people who are prepared to not care about others.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      …because Zoom is much better… (Joking)

      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

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        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.