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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    Talk me down from the paranoia place

    Where the data’s cataloged and sent to cop space

    Reflections on trusting trust 🎶

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • zelnix@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 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@midwest.social
    0·
    2 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
      0·
      2 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
        0·
        2 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
          0·
          2 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
            0·
            2 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

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 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
      0·
      2 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.

  • Codex@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    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!

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 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.

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

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

    I don’t think they ever did.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 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.