Teams

When it comes to Teams, we find some good and some bad. Microsoft has had some bumps this year when it comes to security, most notably a major hack that left their Microsoft Exchange email service vulnerable and exploited. That hack didn’t affect Teams, but coupled with a few other incidents like in December, 2019 when 250 million internal customer service and support logs were exposed online, and Microsoft’s security feels a little uncertain. Microsoft did pay 341 researchers millions of dollars in a year for reporting security vulnerabilities, so their bug bounty project is working. That is good. Teams doesn’t use stronger end-to-end encryption for their video calls, but it does use encryption in transit and at rest, which is OK. Microsoft does collect a fair amount of data on users, and says it uses that data for things like targeted ads as well as sharing it with third-parties like Facebook, Verizon, and combining its data with data from third parties such as data brokers. None of this is great. One good thing we did like about Teams that gives it a leg up over Slack, is Teams for use in your personal life has a feature to allow users to block a contact. This is a great feature for users experiencing harassment or abuse. Note, this feature only works in Teams for personal use; it is not available for Teams through a work or school account. Still, Slack doesn’t have any block feature at all.