In response to the backlash, Microsoft says it will remove usernames from Productivity Score. Instead, the "communications, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility measures in Productivity Score will only aggregate data at the organization level," Microsoft 365 corporate vice president Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post. As such, no one in an organization "will be able to use Productivity Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365."

Three of the other factors the Productivity Score monitors — Microsoft 365 App health, network connectivity, and endpoint analytics — weren't linked to usernames in any case. Instead, according to Spataro, those scores used "device-level identifiers" to help IT departments identify and address various issues with proactive tech support.

Spataro noted that the tool wasn't designed to score individual user productivity — it was supposed to center on the adoption of tech within an organization. Microsoft plans to clarify that in the user interface and "improve our privacy disclosures in the product to ensure that IT admins know exactly what we do and don’t track."