A Boss Reveals Everything Your Company Can Monitor in Microsoft

- Can your boss and your company track your emails, your search history, your team's messages, and even things like your files on your machine? What if I told you, your boss can also find out what you've been doing today by asking copilot and getting back an answer that looks like this. Netflix is accused of hiring executives who are talking bad about their bosses in a private message on Slack.

Companies have let go a number of employees for using things like mouse jiggers to fake activity at their workplace with our digital footprint at work, growing every single day with things like teams, outlook files, search history, and other things inside the Microsoft ecosystem. We're gonna show you in this video what your boss and your company can track about you. We're also assuming that there's no extra stuff installed, no third party apps, no monitoring devices installed on the device itself and just what Microsoft is providing your company about you.

The first question we're going to ask is, what does Microsoft know about your search history? Let's imagine, for example, you use Bing, one of the Microsoft products, and you have gone in the top right and signed in with your company credentials or maybe your personal credentials up in that top right. That stuff is tracked, but that does not bubble up to your company.

You can see things like the most requested searches that are more company-based searches, but you're not able to see other things as far as your website traffic. Microsoft is not actually tracking that. Even if you're using an Edge browser now they're tracking it for you personally.

It stays on the device or it might stay in the cloud, but your company does not have access to that. If you are at the office especially, you've gotta assume that every type of search you do and every type of of website that you visit is being tracked. The next question is, can my boss or my company see my email messages?

Can they also see my team's messages? Well, the short answer is yes. Let's find out how.

First of all, I'm going to go to the admin center here. Once in the admin center, I'm gonna go on the left side, go to show all and the click on compliance. This compliance center allows our company to look for things like security vulnerabilities that we might have.

This content search will allow me to go in, type in whatever name I wish, click on next, specify where I want to search. In this case, I'm gonna search through exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, which are inclusive of things like my team sites and my team's messages. Click on next and then I can build a query, whether it be a query that you're seeing here, a KQL query, or I can build my own query here.

I can also then select things like I only wanna search for things from a certain sender, from a certain receiver. We can also look for subject lines of certain caliber. I'm gonna type the keyword in here, YouTube, and then click on next.

What we're basically searching for here is when has Zane had a word YouTube in a teams message or in an email? It's then going to run a query. Now this query can take - It to five minutes to run, at least in many cases.

As you can see, now we have completed the search. We can then select on this, this query, and we can see all the parameters of the search. Now, this is not the interesting part.

We can see how many items were were returned in that search, how many locations were searched, as well as the size of those, those files that are going to be returned. In this case, you can see how many hits we had. We had zero hits in number of those areas, and if I went through actions, I could then hit export results.

If I were to export these results, it will spend another four or five minutes creating a new PST file and Outlook file with all the messages I want inside that file. Now, what would your company ever need this? If Zane in our case is leaving the organization and they want to get a backup of all of his messages that were pertaining to a certain case perhaps or pertaining to a certain type of work item he's working on, this would allow them to create a PST file as that backup.

In addition, we can also go back to the admin center and look up Zane here, and if I'm an IT person in this case, I can go over to mail and then add myself to read writes to Zane's inbox. What we're gonna see here is when I go to that read and manage permissions, I can become Zane and see every message that Zane has has sent and received like, I'm Zane. This is excellent if Zane is about to lead the organization also, because now I can now have access to all of his support inbox before he left the organization.

Microsoft also gives you things, other reports like insider risk management where I can write queries of anything that might be controversial or put my company at risk in this case. If I do that, I will see any files, any email messages, any teams messages that might be questionable in that case. Also, so your company can read this, you'll see in my case the trial, but if I activate that trial, we can also see that information here as well.

Next, let's go to teams and what can my manager see about my teams activity? Let's start with my usage reports. I'm first gonna go over to the teams admin center.

Once they're, I wanna find out what type of activity at a high level my users are doing. I'll then go to analytics and reporting and go to usage reports. There's a lot of rolled up reports here, like what apps are being used, what phone calls are happening, but the one I really care about is a team's user activity.

Here I'm gonna do this over 30 days and find out how active certain folks have been. As you can see here, first of all, that all these I, all the usernames are these GUIs that you're seeing. Microsoft's trying to protect the employee from over surveillance of their company.

However, these can be turned off to where I can see the username or I can do a lookup to find each username. Also, we'll get a report showing the activity of each of these users, how many teams messages they've done, how many files they've done, how many meetings they've done, how many minutes, how many phone calls, all this kind of information, including their last activity date - Inside ecosystem here inside of teams in this case. What else can I find out about Zane here?

I'm gonna go ahead and look him up one more time to get more information about Zane. Once I search for him, we'll get a profile shot of everything about Zane and once I go here, we'll notice that under meetings, that he's in a meeting right now with 30 people, and if I select that meeting, we can see more information about it, like you know what the participation is in that meeting, what's going on inside there, but let's find a meeting that's a little bit more intimate. There's two types of meetings we can have here, one's that are more a full on meeting and one's that are more calls.

Let's open up a conference first. This is the meeting between Matt and Zane. We can see Matt showed up a little bit late for this meeting.

Zane got there early and we can also find out what time they did, how much participation was and how much traffic there was on their network while how, how good the quality of the network was During this meeting as well. Microsoft's providing us to you more from a a diagnostic information, so if I go back to this again and I look up more of a call, we're gonna get a ton of diagnostic information about Zane right down to what microphone he used and even things like how, how full his battery was in his microphone. So as you can see, if I open up a call, for example, this call right here, let's take a look at it was two people in this call, and if you look at this, we're gonna see the diagnostic information about this call.

So the left side, we see Zane on the right side, we see Matt, and as we select the left side, we can see what kind of connectivity he had and all that information, including his headset stats as well. We can also, as we're doing this, go to the advanced tab and see even more information. Now, as you look at this, you might be a little bit freaked out at first that there's something called jitter in there.

It's more about the network jittering in this case, how many blips there were in the networks, and as you can see, the latency is pretty darn good, but nothing really controversial can be found inside this panel. In this case, as you can see, building these reports to see your team's activities is not very difficult, but later I'm gonna show you how AI is going to make this even easier for your manager. Also, the next question we have is what about the presence of Zane?

Microsoft in this case has not provided a rolled up report to the employers about your presence details. They provide you a state a point in time image of that while your employer and your team can see whether you're online right now, by you turning green like you see above me, they can't see a rolled up version of how long you've been green each day. Microsoft has turned off that ability.

However, your employer can still get that, whether it be through third party applications or whether it be by building a, a shell script, a PowerShell script by using these three words. You see right here above me, these three words are using something called the graph API, which allows you to manage and read data at a Microsoft 365. In this case, I could pass - A ID in and get back their presence.

As you can imagine, this can be automated. We can also ask what is everybody's presence at the company? And that can be automated to run every 30 seconds, five minutes, one hour, whatever you wish, and that would tell your employer at that point whether Brian has been available for meetings or for whatever, every single hour of the day.

So be weary, even though there's no rolled up report by Microsoft, your employer could still build something like that to gather that information. The next question is what files do I have access to of Zane? If I'm his employer, an IT staff or an admin, I can simply create a link by selecting Zane's account and hitting that create shareable link right there.

Once I do that, it's going to give me a link where I can see any files that Zane has saved over to OneDrve for business. Why would I ever wanna do this? Well, if Zane is leaving the organization, this is the way I can back up those files or there's been some type of litigation, I can back those files up.

Also, once I paste that link in, I can see every file that you're seeing right here that Zane has saved to OneDrve for business. I can go inside the folders and even open up the files and keep in mind, Zane does not even know I'm doing this. The last area is artificial intelligence using copilot.

What can I ask about Zane in artificial intelligence? I'm also gonna paste in a quick question. I'm about to do a one-on-one with Zane.

What are my last, what is Zane working on right now? What are my last interactions with Zane? All I have to do is put a forward slash here and I can type in Zane's information.

Once I do that, I can get everything that Zane might be talking about on in the public teams, channels, everything are the files he's working on, that he shared any kind of messages with myself as his boss. And there we go. We get the nice little bulleted list here of all those conversations.

As you can see, I can hover over and link to any of those conversations files and email messages. I can also ask additional questions. One of my additional questions could be, is there anything inappropriate in these messages?

We'll get a synopsis from copilot, finding out that Zane is clean as a whistle. If this AI stuff really interest you, we recently did a YouTube series on it, you'll find that link above me now, or you can go to pragmatic works. com.

To get way more information about AI and copilot, simply go to pragmatic works. com and you'll find a learning management tool, a whole bunch of classes from Devon and myself and others, how you can use copilot. You can also use a coupon code Brian 40 to get a 40% discount on that.

So what does Microsoft think of all this? Well, Microsoft has recently posted a number of articles where there are really slamming companies for overly tracking their employees, and they've actually restricted some of the reports that were previously available to those employers. So what do you think of this?

Where do you think the line between surveillance and productivity is in the comments window? Let us know what you think and let's have a conversation.