by The Department for Education Department in New South Wales was surprised when Microsoft started the teams with the video conference app of the team in March with the collection of voice and the biometric data of students.
At the end of last year, Microsoft announced that the data acquisition will be made possible in March for a team function as a voice and face registration.
Voice and face registration in teams creates a voice and face “profile” for each participant in team meetings, from which the company improves audio quality, reduces the background noise and enables the software to speak in meetings by recognizing their voice and face.
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The data is also fed into Microsoft’s large language model copilot to improve the accuracy of the transcription or the summaries if this is activated in these meetings.
The NSW Education Department’s website creates the teams of schools as a “stroke for teachers and students to get involved, create, interact and work together.
“It is a one-stop communication platform that combines chat, video briefings/lessons, file memory, assignments and integration of several applications,” says the website.
Guardian Australia can show that the department for a month when the Voice and Face registration for teams was switched on in March.
“A new Microsoft team with which the enrollment of language and facial authorities for the discussions of people in teams in our network was quickly deactivated, and all facial or speech recognition profiles created were removed,” said a spokesman for the educational department.
The function was eliminated in April and the profiles were deleted within 24 hours after the department’s awareness that the voice and enrollment were activated by facial authorities.
The educational department did not answer any questions about the number of students or employees who had collected biometric data in the available time or whether those affected had been informed.
A concerned parent that made Guardian Australia aware of the matter was concerned that the department had given them despite the assurances about the deleted data and the functions were eliminated, other parents may not have been aware that they had primarily been collected.
Microsoft retains a copy of the data, while a user is enrolled and a user can delete the profile at any time. If a user deletes his team account, Microsoft states on his website that he deletes the biometric data within 90 days.
Rys Farthing, the director of politics and research at the research organization.
“The biometric data of young people have been unnecessarily collected, creates real concerns – these students now have a lifetime to live with these risks,” said Farthing.
“Was this data been trained after your collection? Are we sure that they have not been disclosed or shared during their existence, and that all copies of it have been deleted? Data like toothpaste, it is difficult to put them back into the tube as soon as they have been collected.
“This only shows why we need greater protection in relation to children’s data, especially to prevent excessive collection. It is worrying.”
Microsoft refused to comment.
