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this news again comes courtesy of Microsoft’s roadmap service, where Redmond prepares you for the joys to come.
This time, there are a couple of joys.
The first is headlined: “Microsoft 365 compliance center: Insider risk management — Increased visibility on browsers.”
It all sounded wonderful until you those last four words, didn’t it? For this is the roadmap for administrators. And when you give a kindly administrator “increased visibility on browsers,” you can feel sure this means an elevated level of surveillance of what employees are typing into those browsers.
In this case, Microsoft is targeting “risky activity.” Which, presumably, has some sort of definition. It offers a link to its compliance center, where the very first sentence has whistleblower built in: “Web browsers are often used by users to access both sensitive and non-sensitive files within an organization.”
And what is the compliance center monitoring? Why, “files copied to personal cloud storage, files printed to local or network devices, files transferred or copied to a network share, files copied to USB devices.”
You always assumed this was the case? Perhaps. But now there will be mysteriously increased visibility.
“How might this visibility be increased?,” I hear you shudder. Well, there’s another little roadmap update that may, just may, offer a clue.
This one proclaims: “Microsoft 365 compliance center: Insider risk management — New ML detectors.”
Yes, your company will soon have extra-special robots to crawl along after you and observe your every “risky” action. It’s not enough to have increased visibility on browsers. You must also have Machine Learning constantly alert for someone revealing your lunch schedule.
Microsoft offers a link to its Insider Risk Management page. This enjoys some delicious phrasing: “Customers acknowledge insights related to the individual user’s behavior, character, or performance materially related to employment can be calculated by the administrator and made available to others in the organization.”
Yes, even your character is being examined here.
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Source: Microsoft will now snitch on you at work like never before | ZDNet
Robin Edgar
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