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.
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
Yeah, watch the network traffic from Teams and kind hard not to think of them as data harvesters. In a day, there are close to a hundred servers involved that will leave your country for no functional reason
“anymore” 🤣
Could?
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.
Talk me down from the paranoia place
Where the data’s cataloged and sent to cop space
Reflections on trusting trust 🎶
Not one uses IIS.
How sure are you about that? I work for a global MSP and see it all the time.
Every single corporation is doing what they’re legally bound to do: increase profits for shareholders. Companies don’t and never have cared about the customer. They care about a customer as much as you care about an NPC. What’s with people thinking that they ever cared??
Of course MS is using that data. Why wouldn’t they?? Would they lose customers if people found out? Nope. If you were in charge of making that decision, you would use that data too. And if you’re too held to your privacy morals, you’ll never be in that position at MS because they only place people that will decide to maximize profits.
Here’s how you know a company is doing something: Would it make them more money? Then theyre doing it. That’s it.
Also, it’s MICROSOFT!! lol Not Mozilla, RedHat, Canonical, or the Linux Foundation. Remember when someone shoved a pie in Bill Gates face?
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.
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!
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.
> my company feeds all our data to big tech
> is big tech gonna use that data for malicios purposes?
there’s your answer
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.
Teams is built on top of the old SKYPE infrastructure. It is a bastardisation of Skype (communications) and SharePoint (data storage)
As it is built on Skype, all the acces Leo had as part of Skype still exist. MS is a US org and have the legal requirements to tap communications for Leo.
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.
