Microsoft rolled out its new “Productivity Score” feature this month, which lets bosses track how their employees use Microsoft’s suite of tools. If that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare in the making to you, you’re not alone—privacy experts are criticizing the company for essentially gamifying workplace surveillance.
When Microsoft first announced the feature in October, the company billed it as a way to provide “insights that transform how work gets done” to employers. To do this, the tool gathers data on each employee’s behavior across 73 metrics and presents a handy-dandy breakdown to their bosses at the end of each month, Forbes reports.
These metrics include how often workers turn their cameras on during virtual meetings, how frequently they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month, just to name a few. Microsoft lays out all the ways it monitors you through its office suite in the company’s own documentation, though admittedly you’ll have to go digging through about a dozen web pages to find them.