Australia

Australia: Biometric Data of NSW Students Collected by Microsoft Teams

MAY 19 2025·Updated MAY 20 2025

Story

Above: A laptop keyboard and Microsoft Teams on App Store displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on March 17, 2025. Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The Facts

A report from the Guardian Australia claimed that videoconferencing software Microsoft Teams collected the biometric data of students for a month, before being noticed by the New South Wales (NSW) education department.
guardian
Au
Microsoft reportedly enabled a feature that collected face and voice data from Teams users in March. The department became aware of the data collection in early April, turning the feature off and stating that they retained no biometric data.
Au
Information Age
NSW Education Minister Prue Carr has called for a “full briefing” from the department regarding the matter. Microsoft says that no one had access to the "encrypted" biometric data, which they erase within 90 days of a deletion request, according to the company website.
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guardian
The Teams feature which activated biometric collection, voice and face enrollment, is used to improve call quality and transcription accuracy as provided by the CoPilot large language model. The number of staff or students affected in NSW is currently unknown.
guardian
The Australia Today
Shadow education minister Sarah Mitchell called the incident a "complete breach of privacy and trust," calling for affected parties to be notified and the scale of the biometric collection to be revealed.
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MSN

Sources Split

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The Spin

Narrative A

This was an egregious mistake on the part of the education department and a violation on the part of Microsoft of student privacy. In the digital age, it is paramount that we protect students from data harvesting as technology advances. The biometric data of our youngest and most vulnerable should not be given away.

The Educator K/12

Narrative B

This was an unfortunate incident, but the fact remains that student privacy was not compromised. All biometric data was encrypted and was never open for human access — it is a misnomer to suggest that personal data was used to train CoPilot or Teams. All data used to train AI systems is broken into abstract, mathematical bits, and thus posed no risk to the students.