Image: Microsoft/Protocol
Working hard or hardly working?

Good morning! This Thursday, Microsoft tries to avoid workplace surveillance, Qualcomm sees mobile taking over everything, the Senate pushes a new FCC member and we'll never ever ever stop fighting about Section 230.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Source Code every day.)
Microsoft's Productivity Score isn't an entirely new feature, but it's been under new scrutiny over the last week after researcher Wolfie Christl tweeted that, "A new feature to calculate 'productivity scores' turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool."
It's an almost-too-perfect summation of a key tension inside companies everywhere right now. On one hand, you want to give your team what they need to succeed, and to make sure they're keeping up; on the other, logging their keystrokes and watching through their webcams feels creepy and bad. Microsoft's very clear that it doesn't want to be a workplace surveillance tool, but it does want to help companies do their best work. The line between the two is ... blurry.
Microsoft tweaked the way the Productivity Score works earlier this week. "We've heard the feedback, and today we're responding by making changes to the product to further bolster privacy for customers," Jared Spataro, who runs Microsoft 365, wrote in a blog post this week. The biggest change: no more individually identifiable user names. I called Spataro to talk about why this has become so complicated, and why Microsoft changed its mind so quickly.
Keep an eye on this debate, within Microsoft and everywhere. Is it even possible to attempt to understand and optimize your team without also giving yourself the ability to surveil them? If you're going to do any of it, what are you required to tell your team? It matters within every company, but might matter most of all to companies like Microsoft, who make the tools all those companies can use — and abuse.
Apple's new M1 Macs were just the beginning. Smartphone chips — or, at least, chips made with the knowledge and revenue that comes from a decade of making smartphone chips — are invading everything with an on switch.
This week is Qualcomm's annual Tech Summit, and (as usual) it announced a splashy new smartphone processor, the Snapdragon 888. But Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm's head of mobile, told me that the big trend to come is mobile eating everything.
Qualcomm's working with a lot of industries now, putting modems into cars and washing machines and all sorts of other places you'd never have imagined possible in 1985. But Katouzian said mobile will keep influencing the rest of the space for a long time to come. Because things are moving so fast with mobile gaming, cameras, AR and elsewhere — he mentioned eye-tracking computing a couple of times — "I think the creativity and the innovation that gets put in place for premium tier solutions is just going to scale up," he said.
Emily Birnbaum writes: The Senate Commerce Committee voted 14-12 to advance Nathan Simington to the FCC. So I'm sure you're wondering: Who is Nathan Simington?
Simington is a Trump ally. He helped write the Department of Commerce petition that led the FCC to reconsider the future of Section 230. Trump nominated Simington instead of Michael O'Rielly, the current Republican FCC commissioner whose nomination was pulled over his opposition to Trump's social media executive order.
The full Senate still has to consider his nomination, and it's unclear if Mitch McConnell wants to use some of this session's final moments to argue with Democrats about an FCC nominee. But the vote on Wednesday bodes well for Simington, whose nomination could wind up gridlocking the FCC for months.
At Micron, we see an opportunity to establish memory and storage platform capabilities that will unleash software developers to deliver solutions that speed insight and ultimately support emerging customer requirements. The data-centric era has ushered in a new opportunity to tap data for business growth, but many companies continue to struggle to transform mounting data stores into competitive advantage.
Google's ethical AI leader Timnit Gebru said she was fired in part because Jeff Dean didn't like an email she wrote:
You know how Trump threatened to veto a military spending bill if Section 230 wasn't repealed? One congressional aide told us it's probably nothing:
Beware the idea that everybody needs a co-founder, Block Party's Tracy Chou said:
Emil Michael had a good explanation for why self-driving cars are taking so much longer than we hoped:
Section 230 isn't about neutrality, and we shouldn't make it that way, Jimmy Wales said:
Seth McGuire is the new CRO at Galileo. He was previously at Twitter and Backbone.
Steve Wilson is QCode's new chief strategy officer. He was Apple's longtime podcasts exec, and is someone who practically everyone in audio knows well.
Gumroad is the latest company to stop tying salary to location. "Gumroad will now pay you the same salary, no matter if you live in San Francisco, Bangalore, Lagos, or anywhere else," CEO Sahil Lavingia tweeted.
Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy Wondery for more than $300 million. Evidently it's not content to let Spotify buy the whole podcast industry for itself.
I mean, at this stage it's possible the whole game is just one big troll designed to mess with gamers. But the much-delayed, always-close-but-never-here game is actually set to launch next week. Still, that means there's a whole week left in which to drop those yellow screenshotted notes that instantly strike fear into the hearts of gamers everywhere who are desperate to play it. Even when they're rick rolls.
At Micron, we see an opportunity to establish memory and storage platform capabilities that will unleash software developers to deliver solutions that speed insight and ultimately support emerging customer requirements. The data-centric era has ushered in a new opportunity to tap data for business growth, but many companies continue to struggle to transform mounting data stores into competitive advantage.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.