Ask Lemmy

Your name isn’t private information.

What if I don't want to give it to Microsoft?

Your photo doesn’t have to be included in M365, and isn’t by default in any organization I’ve worked with.

My company mandates that we put our mugs on Teams so "people know who they're talking to".

Your personal address also isn’t in your work profile on M365, that’s usually in an HR system somewhere, not kept in Active Directory. Your salary is the same, it’s not stored in your M365 profile, and neither is your sick days. This simply isn’t normal M365 functionality.

When the fucking secretary puts all that stuff in an Excel file, and everybody's photos - and company photos - in a sharepoint, and the accountant does the payroll in M365, it is.

Microsoft also doesn’t just have access to this information the way you think they do. They can’t just log in with an admin account and check your current status on teams, or read your e-mails, or anything like that.

That's right: nobody logs in with an admin account: all that data you feed Microsoft is processed automatically.

You don't really think they take your money and honestly host your data and provides services without raping your and your company's information every which way do you? Big Data's entire business model is exploiting other people's data.

Microsoft's gig is really clever: they force people who otherwise would never give any information to Microsoft to do so by selling their employers services that are cheaper than on-prem, and in turn, their employers force the employees to share their information with Microsoft on pain of getting the sack.