(BBC) – Technology giant Microsoft has filed a patent for a system to monitor employees’ body language and facial expressions during work meetings and give the events a “quality score”. A filing suggests it could be deployed in real-world meetings or online virtual get-togethers.
It envisions rooms being packed with sensors to monitor the participants, which could raise privacy concerns. Microsoft is already under fire over a separate “productivity-score” tool. That feature was introduced last year but came to prominence only after a public demo at a corporate event.
It allows managers to keep track of individual workers’ use of Microsoft’s Office 365 software – including Outlook email and the Teams meeting and Excel spreadsheet apps. Microsoft points out the facility is not enabled by default and suggests its primary goal is to identify IT shortcomings.
But critics say it is effectively an employee-surveillance tool. Companies do not always make use of patents they register. But they often reveal ideas in development before they appear in commercial products. Details of the “meeting-insight computing system” were filed in July, ahead of being made public this month. They say the sensors could record:
- which invitees actually attend a meeting
- attendees’ body language and facial expressions
- the amount of time each participant spent contributing to the meeting
- speech patterns “consistent with boredom [and] fatigue”
They also suggest employees’ mobile devices could be used to monitor whether they were simultaneously engaged in other tasks – such as texting or browsing the internet – as well as to check their schedule to take into account whether they had had to attend other meetings the same day. FULL REPORT
