<story><title>I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-microsoft-teams-tracks-users-and-my-head-is-spinning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>branon</author><text>Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it&amp;#x27;s just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons.&lt;p&gt;You can see &amp;quot;skype&amp;quot; present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well.&lt;p&gt;Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer.&lt;p&gt;On top of that, it doesn&amp;#x27;t even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop&amp;#x2F;web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can&amp;#x27;t even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video.&lt;p&gt;Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it&amp;#x27;s almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that&amp;#x27;s available when the core of the program&amp;#x2F;service is so lacking in comparison.&lt;p&gt;The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft&amp;#x27;s services is convenient. It&amp;#x27;s nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling&amp;#x2F;joining&amp;#x2F;managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing.&lt;p&gt;Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio&amp;#x2F;video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype.&lt;p&gt;All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don&amp;#x27;t even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.</text></item><item><author>arpyzo</author><text>I personally find Teams to be an abomination.&lt;p&gt;I asked my wife the other day, who isn&amp;#x27;t familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said &amp;quot;I have no idea&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list of things I detest about Teams.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>russellendicott</author><text>Have you noticed that you can&amp;#x27;t copy and paste all the text from a conversation?&lt;p&gt;At least the feature request has 2900 upvotes.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&amp;#x2F;forums&amp;#x2F;555103-public&amp;#x2F;suggestions&amp;#x2F;31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations#comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&amp;#x2F;forums&amp;#x2F;555103-public&amp;#x2F;su...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-microsoft-teams-tracks-users-and-my-head-is-spinning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>branon</author><text>Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it&amp;#x27;s just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons.&lt;p&gt;You can see &amp;quot;skype&amp;quot; present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well.&lt;p&gt;Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer.&lt;p&gt;On top of that, it doesn&amp;#x27;t even work that well. The entire app is slow on mobile, compared with desktop&amp;#x2F;web where only some parts are slow. Feature parity across platforms is very poor. You can&amp;#x27;t even join audio calls in Firefox, let alone use video.&lt;p&gt;Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it&amp;#x27;s almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that&amp;#x27;s available when the core of the program&amp;#x2F;service is so lacking in comparison.&lt;p&gt;The only positive thing I can say about Teams is that its integration with the rest of Microsoft&amp;#x27;s services is convenient. It&amp;#x27;s nice to be able to see my calendar in Teams without opening Outlook. Tools for scheduling&amp;#x2F;joining&amp;#x2F;managing meetings also work well. If coworkers share Microsoft documents in a Teams channel, clicking them will (sluggishly) open the document in Teams, ready for editing.&lt;p&gt;Outside of integration, the search function works passably, but is painfully slow. Group audio&amp;#x2F;video calls work fine too, but then again, they also worked fine back when the app was called Skype.&lt;p&gt;All of the things that work, however, are damaged by how lukewarm and _slow_ the overall experience is. Even features as basic as IM are half-baked. Not many messages fit on the screen at once, and scrolling up to see past messages is a nightmare, since messages lazy-load only when they are made visible, or the scroll bar will reset its position and snap back down to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;I read the article and the bullet-pointed list of data that Teams tracks doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like all that big of a deal to me. It makes sense that analytics would be running on everything you type into Teams. Always assume anything you use for work is wiretapped to hell and back, doubly so if Big Tech is involved. I am much more concerned about the fact that I don&amp;#x27;t even get a functional IM client out of the arrangement.</text></item><item><author>arpyzo</author><text>I personally find Teams to be an abomination.&lt;p&gt;I asked my wife the other day, who isn&amp;#x27;t familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said &amp;quot;I have no idea&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list of things I detest about Teams.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious.&lt;p&gt;The backend protocol that Teams uses &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the &amp;quot;OG Skype&amp;quot; binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the &amp;quot;skypetoken&amp;quot;. The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward, given that things like &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;EionRobb&amp;#x2F;skype4pidgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;EionRobb&amp;#x2F;skype4pidgin&lt;/a&gt; already exist.&lt;p&gt;All the users see and complain about is the horrid sluggishness, and Electron and the &amp;quot;webapp everything&amp;quot; craze is mostly responsible for that, but the backend protocol itself is also a bloated abomination.&lt;p&gt;A long time ago I wrote an MSNP client and used it right until MS finally shut down the servers a few years ago. It was a native Win32 application in a single binary &amp;lt;32KB and barely took any memory (at most a few MB). No audio or video, but IM and presence worked perfectly. Like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and the other oldschool Internet protocols, MSNP is also a text-based protocol that runs directly over a socket. You could almost use it from a netcat if you really wanted to. It wasn&amp;#x27;t perfect but everything about it was in some ways &lt;i&gt;sane&lt;/i&gt;. If I remember correctly, a single message would be a few dozen bytes of overhead.&lt;p&gt;The Teams&amp;#x2F;MS-Skype protocol is a stark contrast. It runs over HTTPS, which is an advantage in some ways with the current trend of stuffing other protocols over it, but it&amp;#x27;s not like they simply took MSNP and tunneled it over HTTPS, which would&amp;#x27;ve been a far saner approach --- it&amp;#x27;s radically different and everything is far less efficient and more complex to handle as a result. JSON everywhere. Each message has several hundred bytes of overhead, and more like kilobytes if you count the HTTP layer and everything below it. Things are split between .skype.com and .messenger.live.com with no real consistency. Trying to get presence to actually work reliably has been a nightmare (the official client apparently has problems with that too...) I&amp;#x27;m not surprised there&amp;#x27;s no official documentation on the API&amp;#x2F;protocol, because it&amp;#x27;s a bloody mess. As you may guess, I have been trying to write a native client for it.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Some of the features that work well (searching for reaction GIFs) seem unnecessary, and it&amp;#x27;s almost insulting to see the amount of add-ins and superfluous crap that&amp;#x27;s available when the core of the program&amp;#x2F;service is so lacking in comparison.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This may be a rather controversial point, but software quality overall seems to have taken a steep nosedive not long after the whole &amp;quot;everyone can code&amp;#x2F;diversity&amp;#x2F;inclusion&amp;quot; movement took off. Yes, apparently everyone can code --- just not very well. I think things like all this proliferation of mostly-useless features are a symptom of that. We are simply seeing the results of quantity over quality in an industry which has shifted to rewarding sheer participation and &amp;quot;disruptive change&amp;quot; over a carefully deliberated path to perfection.</text></comment>