<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/19/nsw-education-department-caught-unaware-after-microsoft-teams-began-collecting-students-biometric-data>
"The New South Wales education department was caught by surprise when Microsoft
began collecting the voice and facial biometric data of school students using
the Teams video conferencing app in March.
Late last year, Microsoft announced it would enable data collection by default,
commencing in March, for a Teams feature known as voice and face enrolment.
Voice and face enrolment in Teams creates a voice and face “profile” for each
participant in Teams meetings, which the company said improves the audio
quality, reduces background noise and enables the software to tell who is
speaking in meetings by recognising their voice and face.
The data is also fed into Microsoft’s large language model CoPilot to improve
accuracy in transcription or summaries when that is enabled in those meetings.
The NSW education department website states Teams is used by schools as “a hub
for teachers and students to engage, create, interact, and collaborate”.
“It’s a one-stop communication platform that combines chat, video
meetings/lessons, file storage, assignments and integration of multiple
applications,” the website states.
Guardian Australia can reveal that when the voice and face enrolment for
Teams was switched on in March, the department was caught unaware for a month.
“A new Microsoft Teams feature that allowed voice and facial enrolment for
people entering Teams meetings was quickly disabled across our network, and any
face or voice recognition profiles that were created have been removed,” a
spokesperson for the education department said.
The feature was switched off in April and the profiles were deleted within 24
hours of the department becoming aware that voice and facial enrolment was
enabled.
The education department did not answer questions about the number of students
or staff who had biometric data collected on them in the time it was available,
or if those affected had been informed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
