I work on Teams (I know, I know... please don't hit me, it's not my fault)
1. I don't speak authoritatively and
2. I don't have knowledge of the whole product - there's always a rogue team here and there doing stuff.
We've had that feature turned on at MSFT for some time now. It does not allow your manager to see that you're at Starbucks, at home, on the shitter or anything like that. There's a new toggle in the calendar settings called "Share location with my organization", and the settings are: "all details: building, desk, etc.", "general location: office or remote", "can't view any location information". What it does when turned on is just adding, at the top of your calendar, icons that tell you which of your colleagues are in office, and if they share and you click on someone's picture, what building they're in (when it works).
The whole "it will tell your manager what your wifi is" is just baseless extrapolation, and plainly false from what I can tell.
Thanks for showing up to provide some corrective information. I know it can feel like opening a box of yellowjackets, but one of the best things about the HN community is when someone with first-hand knowledge is willing to share what they know.
This is how I expected the feature to work once I read the real product brief, so that's a plus at least. You might want to tell your product people to ask whoever deals with this stuff at Microsoft anymore if they can, like, talk to the press about it? Various outlets have been running stories for almost a year now about how Teams is going to start sending your WiFi data to your boss.
The wording on the product page also makes it sound like tenant administrators will get to decide how opt-in works (ie - that they could select which options the end-user is allowed to pick, and at Microsoft they happened to give you the freedom of choice); this makes sense from my experience in enterprise software management but also makes the feature seem like it will be incredibly yucky/annoying. Is that just a case of poor wording?
This still seems like a super weird feature to push through in terms of "yuck" to "value," but I also know how that goes.
Out of curiosity is this related to the 'emergency location' that we admins have to provide for every calling plan user or is it a wholly separate system? Reading the other comments here they must not realize that teams is already tracking their address because it has to know which PSAP to connect them to.
I appreciate you having the guts to comment on working on Teams :)
What do you think the coolest small thing coming to Teams people probably aren't aware of is? Anything cool you've worked on that you're allowed to publicly brag about? How'd you end up working on Teams, just the way things kind of went or something along the lines of what you aimed for?
This happens almost EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a sensationalized headline about something I know about deeply. The title or claim in the article will take a option or feature or some industry where something MAYBE possible and state it as a fact for the propose of creating some kind of fear.
It's not your fault that you chose to work on Teams? Maybe "fault" is not the right word, but it's your choice.
If you think it needs changing, it's in your hands. If you think it's fine to work on Teams, don't apologize.
1. VeryGoodCorp builds a "harmless" feature that's super useful and maybe even opt-in. Only privacy-nuts object to it.
2. The feature is in fact useful, so most people enable it. It may even become company policy to have it enabled.
3. Companies who buy this feature ask for a way to force their employees to use it, as it's "confusing" if location data is only available for 90% of the employees. Not it's an opt-out feature, in the best case.
4. VeryGoodCorp is in a bit of trouble with its shareholders. Revenue growth hasn't been as great lately. They realize that they are sitting on a mountain of location data, aggregated from multiple harmless features, that would tell its customers if their employees are slacking off at work. Surprisingly, the customers are willing to pay good money for a "employee productivity score".
5. Profit..
Edit: formatting
Edit 2: Now you may say "well that wouldn't be legal", and depending on the jurisdiction I'm sure it isn't. But that hasn't kept VeryGoodCorp from collecting this data, they just forgot to turn off the toggle for EU you know, honest mistake. But they still have the data, and laws can change, or, you know, made to change.. (Prop 22 anyone?)
So it only lets Microsoft know people's exact location -- how close is Microsoft to the Trump regime? Nadella has apparently gifted Trump millions?
Why in the f does Word need my location (access to location services) for me to write a document? Pops up every time.
Teams already has a location setting, if you wanted to automate that a more correct way would seem to be adding the feature and offering users the opportunity to turn it on. Microsoft hasn't really changed since the IE days it seems.
It seems like people go out of their way to find something Microsoft, Apple, etc do everyday to get outraged about. Always appreciate someone from the source correcting misinformation and putting it into perspective.
"When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to automatically update their work location to reflect the building they're working from. This feature will be off by default. Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
Working on the systems/security/infrastructure side, we can already do this. Endpoint management systems already report wifi-ssid, internal-IP, whether you are using a vpn to try and hide info. SASE/ZTNA solutions provide location data, username, device used, connection details. Conditional access policies in the tenant already do checks against all of this anyway.
The roadmap just makes the whole thing user-facing so there's a status in Teams of where you currently are. But IT knew all along. And if IT didn't have tools deployed to get this info already count yourself lucky to work at an immature org security-wise.
I was wondering if there was more Microsoft has said/used to say about this feature because it leaves a gap between "connect to your organizations Wi-Fi" and "will show you're connected to Starbucks/Home and what that SSID is".
I followed several articles and the tree I found seems to end with this Neowin article https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-delays-controversial-l... but it doesn't actully clear up the sourcing. I.e. the quote in the article is the same roadmap item, yet the article talks directly to that as if it's the home SSID which will be put into Teams - where is that information in the quote it's describing? I'm not sure if they just didn't source that bit or if it's plain confusion about whether it's really limited to "connecting to your organizations Wi-Fi" which is then being picked up as a hot story.
This feels like a much better feature than “they can track your realtime location from the mobile app” as implied in the article? Plus employees will have to opt in?
The tracking is still gross, but limited to opt-in on office WiFi seems a lot less dramatic of a headline, especially given the main concern people have is work from home
That’s ok, if my work cared enough about whether I was online or at my desk at any specific moment they’d have complained already. I have teams quit completely half the time. I get my work done, my performance reviews are good, I turn up to meetings on time, that’s all that should ever matter.
Also if they cared so much about where I was to punish me for it, I’d quit that company. The only companies I will work for are ones that treat me like an adult, it’s fairly simple.
Our building security system updates something somewhere which ties into email. When we have incidents such as "the lifts are broken" or "the south exit is closed" or whatever, these get emailed to all staff that have been in the the building in the last so many hours (16 I'd assume). It's a handy system.
Ultimately if you are at the type of company which practices presenteeism, then the technology used is immaterial
I guess we need to use some VNC or so, to connect to the machine that runs MS Teams, which sits at the correct workplace. But also need to be able to accept and make calls. I am guessing, even if that data could also be sent via some protocol, the delay might be a lot?
It is sometimes required to know where the user is sitting due to cross border data transfer laws. It seems that Microsoft is making it more easier to implement such requirements.
> automatically update their work location to reflect the building they're working from.
So, either this minimal description is A: an attempt to mask the feature's true purpose of dystopian pocket spying under an innocent-sounding cover, or B: negligently deploying a technical capability with far-reaching consequences without proper diligence or care.
Even if the goal was to enable a pocket panopticon for middle manager spying on WFH staff, in less than 10 seconds I came up with a list of other negative impacts and threat vectors which should freak out any large org's corporate security, legal, compliance and HR teams.
* Like lower level employees not in the 'shielded compartment' seeing that {M&A exec} is currently on {potential acquisition target company's} guest wifi. This kind of accidental location knowledge leak has actually happened between MSFT and Google via a freak analog coincidence and it changed the course of a huge acquisition. This feature makes that accident 1000x more likely.
* Or an employee sues for being dismissed and their lawyer proves through discovery that a manager could have seen they were connected to the wifi of a competitor they might have been interviewing with or an abortion clinic or gay bar, etc.
* Or as part of a harassment claim an employee says the company's required app showed them the phrase "Big Titz Rule!!!" because it was the name of a wifi network another employee was connected to.
Just having an opt-out or hours limit is woefully inadequate. Even if those should prevent senior execs and M&A teams location being accidentally visible to employees not in a trust circle (or worse contractors, vendors or customers looped into a Teams group), it STILL creates huge new threat surfaces. At a minimum the 'feature' needs ways to limit it to only show wifi network names: A. On an approved list, B. Matching a regex pattern, C. limited within a list of IP sub-domains, etc. And at many companies, as part of compliance, all those wifi network names will need to be passed through the "problematic words" list maintained by the HR and security teams (and in many companies hits on those lists trigger auto-reports which will now create discoverable "evidence" in any future lawsuit keyword search).
The unintended-but-foreseable consequences stretch for miles. And this isn't the MSFT Office/Teams group's first self-inflicted trip to this rodeo. I just don't understand how they keep repeating the Same. Obvious. Mistakes.
Fucking hell.
Living in Teams is bad enough without this. It’s only a tiny part of my job, but if it was a major part I’m not sure I could stomach that.
Seriously, this is not a thing. It doesn't even begin to make sense. It's made up.
If you work in a factory with time cards that need to be punched in, and you punch in a buddy's who is late, that's a thing -- a very risky thing if you get caught, since it's fraud.
But the idea that you'll give a coworker your password so they can boot up and log in and somehow make it look like you're online...? Not a thing. And doesn't even make sense today when you can just open your chat client on your phone anyways and be present there. We've been in an era of remote work for a long time now.
This doesn't make any sense. In any organization with a remotely capable IT, you'll still need to log in with your own account. If you give someone else your password to log in... there is a bigger problem.
Exactly this. If you worry about these things, find another job. So much about MS Teams. Nothing about these toxic managers.
If you think it’s normal to call in to have someone pretend you’re there because your manager can’t forgive you some bad traffic you’re pretty far away from a healthy working relationship.
I'm surprised this would be even legal in most European countries... Then again, MS might not care any more. Companies who are not looking for alternatives today won't ever be looking.
The implementation details are sketchy/weak in all sources I can find, but I don't think it's pure (coordinates based) location tracking, but rather a "feature" that will show which WiFi network you're connected to as your Teams status. It's pitched as "what building you're in at the office," which seems like a stretch.
It's also kind of unclear whether the blog post is correct that it would show the name of another network if you connect to it - I'd sort of assume it would just show "Out of Office" instead of "connected to YO_MAMAS_WIFI" or whatever, but who knows.
Maybe this will change one day but at the current moment this is an immediate turnoff. It's like someone trying to show you their project day 1 and it's a page filled with ads and a newsletter popup. You may have good reasons to do that but it doesn't instill a sense of trust and quality.
I don't know how much of it was hand-edited and how much was direct output, but this article has that unmistakable LLM voice. The rhythm, the rhetorical flourishes; it's all there even if it's diffused through some human revision.
The really weird thing is going to be when people start internalizing the LLM voice and writing that way. It's probably happening already.
I'm so embarrassed to say that I read it and didn't notice. But now that you pointed it out, I reread it and you are so right. It is clearly generated.
I have flagged this article on principle. Idk if it it's in the spirit of HN to do that or not, but the button's there, and I'm going to use it.
I truly believe our industry needs to elevate our own anti-awards, like others have (Razzies, Worst Game of the Year, etc.) to shame those responsible for building the regressive tech that corporations and governments push.
There's already the Big Brother Awards [0] and EFF's smattering of Worst Government and Worst Data Breach articles each year. [1]
But I think we need more.
Personally I would love to nominate:
- Mark Stefik and Brad Cox for their contributions to DRM
- Erick Lavoie for his work on Wildvine DRM
- Vern Paxson for his contributions to DPI (Deep Packet Inspection)
- Latanya Sweeney and Alexandre de Montjoye for their contributions to re-identification of anonymized data
- Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis for their work on de-anonymization attacks
>- Latanya Sweeney and Alexandre de Montjoye for their contributions to re-identification of anonymized data
It seems like highlighting how anonymization is a lot harder than a lot of people assume is a really useful service. If researchers can do it, without any particular secret sauce, so can a lot of other people. (Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment.)
Calling out anonymity researchers for showing that "anonymization" schemes don't work well is a stupid and dumb idea.
If they hadn't done it, you can bet that bad guys would have done it instead (and maybe were already doing it). What the researchers did is publicly show that the existing schemes were broken, hence motivating the design of better schemes.
Like, you fundamentally misunderstand computer security research if you think that shitting on people publishing attacks is a good thing.
You're assuming Hollywood studios would ever release their content without DRM of some kind. They were quite content to ignore computers entirely if they didn't bend.
The world where Widevine doesn't exist isn't a DRM free one; but a world where an iPad or Smart TV can stream and a PC can't. I would support giving them an award though for "most repeated invention that keeps failing."
Another thing that I think would help is to start introducing some ethics into our profession as programmers.
Most other professions have you take ethics classes, have ethics boards and even ethics legislation. We're severely lacking in this area as a community. It really shows when every year there's a new company building the Maximum Oppression Orb from the book Dont Build the Maximum Oppression Orb. Its like we're dealing with the moral equivalent of a mentally challenged person all the time
Devil's advocate here about the original post, about physical location: This would definitely have prevented the North Korean workers incident a few years back.
I also find it hard to get offended about because there is basically no job, outside of tech, which doesn't involve physical location. >95% of jobs require physical location. Do you think a concrete worker, a plumber, an electrician, or literally anyone who works with their hands, has a right to location privacy? What does that even mean? "I'm totally clocking in to work today and totally installing a light fixture for a client right now and I won't tell you which one"? "I'm totally making a cappuccino for an old lady right now at one of our 30,000 branches, but trust me, you don't need to know which one"? Whining about this is extremely hard for me to generate sympathies for.
Completely agree. My employer makes all employee badging data available. Any employee can view whether any other employee has badged into the office and when. This includes viewing whether your boss has come in.
However badging data is much more coarse-grained than WiFi. For one, because the building is large, you can’t tell which part of the office the employee is. For two, you can’t tell when the employee has left work because no badging is needed to exit the building.
Some of this could be related to laws that necessitate updated location data for emergency calling. Since a common component of Teams is Teams Phone, there can be a compliance gap. I’m sure this isn’t the whole story, but it is likely one facet: https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law...
There was an article here not too long ago about someone decrying a fellow cow-worker for their rather liberal usage of AI and how their manager would see it and promote it, changing company process in the meantime. The writer found this revulsive. But what I found interesting is what was not discussed. This “Microsoft just did X” is another entry in that.
Folks, let’s not beat around the bush: if you’re not your own boss, you don’t have agency and ultimately you have no control over the situation. The frustration is rooted in the lack of control, or at the very least in the lack of perception of cooperation that is a temporary substitute for agency and control (until the rug gets pulled from underneath them). It’s not Microsoft, it’s not Teams, it’s not AI. It’s not the person being promoted for doing this. It’s you. If it was your company, you could have put an end to it and changed the processes immediately. But it isn’t. So for having the privilege of working at whatever company you’re at, and getting paid whatever money you’re paid, you have to eat shit. This is the price you pay.
If you don’t want to eat shit from your bosses, you have to be your own boss. I think that’s as succinct and straightforward of a solution to things like these that you can find.
After they killed Skype, I tried to install the mobile Teams app. It wouldn't sync properly with the desktop app, so deleted it and forgot it existed. So glad it wouldn't work!
I installed it on my iPhone but didn't allow Bluetooth access or location access. I imagine it can't really do much with how iOS is. I also don't take my work phone with me if I go outside, so Wi-Fi tracking would be fairly useless anyway.
Microsoft really seems to be tripling and quadrupling down on total surveillance of the user's "own" system. If you haven't ditched MS yet, I'd consider it now.
Linux is becoming more and more viable for a gaming PC. For business uses a Linux desktop is usable but probably not ideal, but you also have macOS. I'd pick anything but Windows and MS stuff.
> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network. So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly.
Looks like I need to rename my home wifi to "Corporate Network."
> Remember when you could text Dave from the office to turn your PC on because you were stuck in traffic?
I don't understand why this doesn't still work. If Dave from the office has access to your PC, presumably Dave and your PC are in the office, connected to your office's network, and thus it would appear that you are in the office?
Or is the assumption that you're carrying another device with you that would give you away? In which case, shouldn't the complaint be more about being forced to perform some kind of work task (like carrying/being accessible by your phone) when you're off the clock...which is hardly a new issue/complaint?
Assuming your office has entry gated with a badge (which I assume most do in 2026), don't they already know when you're physically at the office?
Heck, my employer's entry system was already coupled to my phone's location (optional, but meant I didn't have to reserve a desk manually). So, I already looked like I was coming to the office on weekends because the grocery store is next door.
EDIT: not to mention Teams already shows your status as "Away" if you don't type for 5 minutes. Sitting there reading a document - yep, you're clearly smoking in the parking lot or wandering around gossiping.
> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network. So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly
But what if I have a secondary wifi network in my home that says "BigCorpSuperSecureWifi", wouldn't that work? What if that's the name of my phone's hotspot?
Things like this blocking as extremely easy to detect and flag. Because they control the app they can always in-band the information to servers you need to connect to.
I guess you can use wireguard and install a vpn server on your work pc, that being said if your company has a semi competent IT team they will notice that, if you work from home just install wg easy https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
this only works if you control the device and not managed by your company
I think the only outrageous people here are the paranoid and the slackers...
My manager has called me when I was doing a mid-day grocery and I just told him: "sorry for the noise, I am at the grocery store at the moment". This is absolutely no problem at all, he asked if I wanted to call back when I got home...
It's pretty much making a storm in a glass of water here.
That's karma farming by bitching the ebil Microsoft...
Some of my neighbors have some rather colorful Wifi SSIDs. I've seen some silly ones like "FBI SURVEILLANCE" as well as at least one crudely expressing their opinion of the current US President. Probably won't be long now before we see someone get fired because their boss saw the name of their home Wifi network.
My go-to SSID will always be "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--". For all others I just use a ship name from The Culture universe[0] like "Of Course I Still Love You" or "Just Read the Instructions".
The roadmap feature is light on details too: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to automatically update their work location to reflect the building they're working from. This feature will be off by default. Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
I found a lot of news stories about this dating back to where it showed up on the roadmap in early 2025, but none of them with any more implementation details (ie - is it using _only_ WiFi network name, or some other data too?)
Most middle managers will either not require this, or require it but find ways to themselves avoid being tagged as logging into their home wifi. The prevailing culture around middle-management is one of inefficiency and rule avoidance. Middle managers need to be replaced by AI already.
> Microsoft confirmed that starting March 2026 (delayed from January), managers will be able to see your real-time location. And no, disconnecting from the office Wi-Fi won't save you.
Is there anything more than the Wifi SSID stuff below?
> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network. So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly. You can’t hide behind a generic "Remote" status anymore.
So how exactly does this work? It'd be pretty trivial setup my access point to provide a work SSID? How much access does Teams really have to get info to discern your location?
And now 365 tracking people. So the whole company seems to now just be about
sniffing after people. In the past it alleged at the least to enable folks,
say, Win95 perhaps up to WinXP. Now somehow the customer became the enemy.
It's really strange to see.
For what it's worth, unless it can be conclusively argued that surveillance is necessary for the task to be done this sort of continuous surveillance is illegal in Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. It violates the privacy of employees.
This is why unions in the workplace are a good thing. It would prevent management from enabling these god awful policies by using collective bargaining.
Yet the contrarians here will always say "iTs bEtTeR wItHoUt uNiOn cuz I nEgoTiaTe beTtEr"
When I started working at a time with no mobiles and no remote, calling or being called to the office for personal reasons was seen with disrespect from your coworkers. At work you were supposed to be working, and outside of work you were supposed not to be working. Pretty much as in the Severance series, but without the forgetting. With mobiles and connectivity, everything changed, I'm unsure if for better. Now you can work 24/7 or slack all day as if there were no tomorrow.
It seems like the worst practices from Trilogy/Crossover are leaking all over the industry. First the crunch at all times at FAANG, next tracking everyone in a few minute intervals, ending up with real-time video tracking at all times, all spawned by the desire of inept top management to run software development as a manual factory with predictable assembly lines and not an intellectual pursuit.
This is exactly the end state we'll end up in unless the technology sector starts saying no to implementing the tools of petty tyranny.
Hint: Bossware and most things the MBA's drool over.
Unfortunately, there's enough people out there that are fine with implementing said features if it means they get a paycheck; even if it ruins the world for everyone else.
In my opinion, if I want to install any work-related software on my personal devices, it means I’m so excited about the job that I honestly don’t care whether a manager sees where and what I’m doing - just as a manager usually doesn’t care either. I mean, there’s no reason at all to install anything on personal devices unless you actually care about the business.
If they really care every large company already knows what building you are in just by tracking your badge info. This was transparent: I could check my own badge history anytime.
What this does is track when you are not working in the office.
Disgusting, and a potential legal liability for employers if they turn it on. Not in the “invasion of privacy” sense, but the “there was a crime committed in area X and now the cops want our Teams logs from the employees who were there that Microsoft disclosed to them.”
The more data you collect, the bigger your legal liability when something inevitably goes pear-shaped.
Stop treating workers like grifters or prisoners and you won’t have nearly as many problems.
Agree, one could imagine a scenario where a worker went to the bathroom in a not too busy wing, had an anurism, stroke or seizure which left them debilitated right when a fire alarm rings and people need to evacuate. As it is today, the person might die if not found in time, this assumes someone else knew where to look without similar technology.
IF your 365 admins add a list of WiFi SSIDs to Teams, Teams will (optionally, opt-in by user) toggle your work location. It will not report not-known SSIDs to your manager or display it in Teams (but note your 365 admins have always been able to see this in the first place, in call/connectivity troubleshooting).
It's so pathetic that people actually put up with this. There are so many ways to stop that tracking from working and no, your boss doesn't have the right to track you.
Until there is a law, there is nothing to stop them. So you need the law. First person to reach out to would be Ron Wyden, he has been a reliable advocate in this space.
Does UPS have the right to know the location of its drivers?
Of course it does.
I don’t know that we can draw broad conclusions about worker rights on this issue.
My company probably DOES need to know that I’m not taking company information to certain locations like overseas if I work in certain industries like if I am in healthcare covered by HIPAA and I’m handling PHI.
Hyperbolic example, but if I’m taking a teams call or reading my email in North Korea, that is a gigantic problem.
Right to privacy doesn’t exist inside of employer apps and company devices, and there isn’t a strong argument that it should exist.
I don't get it. People complain when they have to go to the office. And then some are given the option to work from home. Then they complain their boss can find out where they are during work hours. What on Earth are you complaining about?
It's about hiring adults, respecting and trusting them to do the job and support the team, and be responsible for their methods. The details are not important to that goal.
If an employer instead treats people like toddlers needing supervision, spoon feeding, and metrics around methods, not work, they will get only that.
It's pretty amazing to see the bubble many people here seem to work in. A guess, but probably 90% of employees have to go to work. Either they physically cannot do their job remotely or the employer demands that they be present.
A lot of people are coming across as whiny children here, "Oh no I might have to go to the office for my 6-figure paycheck." Grow up and go to work, as George Carlin might say.
If this is for people physically working at some place they have access controls and will see if you left the building, when and for how long.
So this is only good to track when your company phone leaves to the toilet. I imagine if they want to get rid of you they just set up a WiFi access point in the toilet and track your poop time. Then tell you to "optimize" your diet so you are more productive or get fired.
I mean it’s Microsoft the king of shitty features.
If this is for catching people working from home, just clone the WiFi and Mac on an OpenWRT 5g mobile router and take it with you and enjoy laughing at your boss while brunching with the whole team on company time.
Sometimes I think people forget that you borrow the company your (life)time and skills for the agreed terms. You’re not some kind of pig that is tracked until you’re fat enough to get butchered.
If your company turns this on, just look for a better workplace immediately that is actually respecting you as a human being and not "human capital" and tell them to get fucked.
the people that sacrificed years of education and hardship to be employed by a company and have a boss in the end of the day your still back to the same predicament. A plumber, electrician, carpenter, has more autonomy than any profession in the US. A surgeon after years of schooling and experience still has to answer to a director or board, wrong doing will lose all of their credentials and revoked in due time.
Add this to the infinite list of reasons why I don't put company-issued spyware on my personal devices. If Slack/Teams/Outlook/whatever wants to "administer" my personal device in any way, it's a hard no for me.
charles_f|1 month ago
1. I don't speak authoritatively and
2. I don't have knowledge of the whole product - there's always a rogue team here and there doing stuff.
We've had that feature turned on at MSFT for some time now. It does not allow your manager to see that you're at Starbucks, at home, on the shitter or anything like that. There's a new toggle in the calendar settings called "Share location with my organization", and the settings are: "all details: building, desk, etc.", "general location: office or remote", "can't view any location information". What it does when turned on is just adding, at the top of your calendar, icons that tell you which of your colleagues are in office, and if they share and you click on someone's picture, what building they're in (when it works).
The whole "it will tell your manager what your wifi is" is just baseless extrapolation, and plainly false from what I can tell.
dang|1 month ago
Edit: from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827312, it does sound like the feature isn't really opt-in for end users though?
bri3d|1 month ago
This is how I expected the feature to work once I read the real product brief, so that's a plus at least. You might want to tell your product people to ask whoever deals with this stuff at Microsoft anymore if they can, like, talk to the press about it? Various outlets have been running stories for almost a year now about how Teams is going to start sending your WiFi data to your boss.
The wording on the product page also makes it sound like tenant administrators will get to decide how opt-in works (ie - that they could select which options the end-user is allowed to pick, and at Microsoft they happened to give you the freedom of choice); this makes sense from my experience in enterprise software management but also makes the feature seem like it will be incredibly yucky/annoying. Is that just a case of poor wording?
This still seems like a super weird feature to push through in terms of "yuck" to "value," but I also know how that goes.
jabroni_salad|1 month ago
This location either uses the named locations I have set up in Entra (we use our public IP ranges for it) or it prompts users for their address if isn't sure. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/emergency-c...
zamadatix|1 month ago
What do you think the coolest small thing coming to Teams people probably aren't aware of is? Anything cool you've worked on that you're allowed to publicly brag about? How'd you end up working on Teams, just the way things kind of went or something along the lines of what you aimed for?
tylerchilds|1 month ago
Kind of like how Microsoft provides services to ICC judges until they won’t?
mlrtime|1 month ago
This happens almost EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a sensationalized headline about something I know about deeply. The title or claim in the article will take a option or feature or some industry where something MAYBE possible and state it as a fact for the propose of creating some kind of fear.
Fear = engagement = ad revenue
unknown|1 month ago
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TavsiE9s|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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mc32|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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absqueued|1 month ago
rozboris|1 month ago
x3ro|1 month ago
2. The feature is in fact useful, so most people enable it. It may even become company policy to have it enabled.
3. Companies who buy this feature ask for a way to force their employees to use it, as it's "confusing" if location data is only available for 90% of the employees. Not it's an opt-out feature, in the best case.
4. VeryGoodCorp is in a bit of trouble with its shareholders. Revenue growth hasn't been as great lately. They realize that they are sitting on a mountain of location data, aggregated from multiple harmless features, that would tell its customers if their employees are slacking off at work. Surprisingly, the customers are willing to pay good money for a "employee productivity score".
5. Profit..
Edit: formatting
Edit 2: Now you may say "well that wouldn't be legal", and depending on the jurisdiction I'm sure it isn't. But that hasn't kept VeryGoodCorp from collecting this data, they just forgot to turn off the toggle for EU you know, honest mistake. But they still have the data, and laws can change, or, you know, made to change.. (Prop 22 anyone?)
esseph|1 month ago
pbhjpbhj|1 month ago
Why in the f does Word need my location (access to location services) for me to write a document? Pops up every time.
Teams already has a location setting, if you wanted to automate that a more correct way would seem to be adding the feature and offering users the opportunity to turn it on. Microsoft hasn't really changed since the IE days it seems.
jajuuka|1 month ago
mcny|1 month ago
bri3d|1 month ago
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?search...
The actual feature brief is:
"When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will soon be able to automatically update their work location to reflect the building they're working from. This feature will be off by default. Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."
Yuck.
uean|1 month ago
The roadmap just makes the whole thing user-facing so there's a status in Teams of where you currently are. But IT knew all along. And if IT didn't have tools deployed to get this info already count yourself lucky to work at an immature org security-wise.
zamadatix|1 month ago
I followed several articles and the tree I found seems to end with this Neowin article https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-delays-controversial-l... but it doesn't actully clear up the sourcing. I.e. the quote in the article is the same roadmap item, yet the article talks directly to that as if it's the home SSID which will be put into Teams - where is that information in the quote it's describing? I'm not sure if they just didn't source that bit or if it's plain confusion about whether it's really limited to "connecting to your organizations Wi-Fi" which is then being picked up as a hot story.
repeekad|1 month ago
The tracking is still gross, but limited to opt-in on office WiFi seems a lot less dramatic of a headline, especially given the main concern people have is work from home
CGMthrowaway|1 month ago
Can't you just rename your home wifi SSID to be whatever your Work wifi is called?
jama211|1 month ago
Also if they cared so much about where I was to punish me for it, I’d quit that company. The only companies I will work for are ones that treat me like an adult, it’s fairly simple.
iso1631|1 month ago
Ultimately if you are at the type of company which practices presenteeism, then the technology used is immaterial
silverwind|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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zelphirkalt|1 month ago
brainzap|1 month ago
Currently I manually check device IPs.
ivell|1 month ago
mrandish|1 month ago
So, either this minimal description is A: an attempt to mask the feature's true purpose of dystopian pocket spying under an innocent-sounding cover, or B: negligently deploying a technical capability with far-reaching consequences without proper diligence or care.
Even if the goal was to enable a pocket panopticon for middle manager spying on WFH staff, in less than 10 seconds I came up with a list of other negative impacts and threat vectors which should freak out any large org's corporate security, legal, compliance and HR teams.
* Like lower level employees not in the 'shielded compartment' seeing that {M&A exec} is currently on {potential acquisition target company's} guest wifi. This kind of accidental location knowledge leak has actually happened between MSFT and Google via a freak analog coincidence and it changed the course of a huge acquisition. This feature makes that accident 1000x more likely.
* Or an employee sues for being dismissed and their lawyer proves through discovery that a manager could have seen they were connected to the wifi of a competitor they might have been interviewing with or an abortion clinic or gay bar, etc.
* Or as part of a harassment claim an employee says the company's required app showed them the phrase "Big Titz Rule!!!" because it was the name of a wifi network another employee was connected to.
Just having an opt-out or hours limit is woefully inadequate. Even if those should prevent senior execs and M&A teams location being accidentally visible to employees not in a trust circle (or worse contractors, vendors or customers looped into a Teams group), it STILL creates huge new threat surfaces. At a minimum the 'feature' needs ways to limit it to only show wifi network names: A. On an approved list, B. Matching a regex pattern, C. limited within a list of IP sub-domains, etc. And at many companies, as part of compliance, all those wifi network names will need to be passed through the "problematic words" list maintained by the HR and security teams (and in many companies hits on those lists trigger auto-reports which will now create discoverable "evidence" in any future lawsuit keyword search).
The unintended-but-foreseable consequences stretch for miles. And this isn't the MSFT Office/Teams group's first self-inflicted trip to this rodeo. I just don't understand how they keep repeating the Same. Obvious. Mistakes.
lostlogin|1 month ago
triceratops|1 month ago
> Remember when you could text Dave from the office to turn your PC on because you were stuck in traffic?
I honestly don't. This was a thing? Why?
> So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly.
I would have a lot of fun with "creative" names for my Wi-fi network.
crazygringo|1 month ago
If you work in a factory with time cards that need to be punched in, and you punch in a buddy's who is late, that's a thing -- a very risky thing if you get caught, since it's fraud.
But the idea that you'll give a coworker your password so they can boot up and log in and somehow make it look like you're online...? Not a thing. And doesn't even make sense today when you can just open your chat client on your phone anyways and be present there. We've been in an era of remote work for a long time now.
g947o|1 month ago
chorlton2080|1 month ago
Yes, MAC addresses can be spoofed, but that isn't going to be what most employees will do.
kstrauser|1 month ago
teekert|1 month ago
If you think it’s normal to call in to have someone pretend you’re there because your manager can’t forgive you some bad traffic you’re pretty far away from a healthy working relationship.
black_puppydog|1 month ago
tjoff|1 month ago
bri3d|1 month ago
It's also kind of unclear whether the blog post is correct that it would show the name of another network if you connect to it - I'd sort of assume it would just show "Out of Office" instead of "connected to YO_MAMAS_WIFI" or whatever, but who knows.
kevinh|1 month ago
krelian|1 month ago
mortenjorck|1 month ago
The really weird thing is going to be when people start internalizing the LLM voice and writing that way. It's probably happening already.
cvoss|1 month ago
I have flagged this article on principle. Idk if it it's in the spirit of HN to do that or not, but the button's there, and I'm going to use it.
bnchrch|1 month ago
There's already the Big Brother Awards [0] and EFF's smattering of Worst Government and Worst Data Breach articles each year. [1]
But I think we need more.
Personally I would love to nominate:
- Mark Stefik and Brad Cox for their contributions to DRM
- Erick Lavoie for his work on Wildvine DRM
- Vern Paxson for his contributions to DPI (Deep Packet Inspection)
- Latanya Sweeney and Alexandre de Montjoye for their contributions to re-identification of anonymized data
- Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis for their work on de-anonymization attacks
[0]http://www.bigbrotherawards.org/
[1]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/breachies-2025-worst-w...
ghaff|1 month ago
It seems like highlighting how anonymization is a lot harder than a lot of people assume is a really useful service. If researchers can do it, without any particular secret sauce, so can a lot of other people. (Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment.)
Ar-Curunir|1 month ago
If they hadn't done it, you can bet that bad guys would have done it instead (and maybe were already doing it). What the researchers did is publicly show that the existing schemes were broken, hence motivating the design of better schemes.
Like, you fundamentally misunderstand computer security research if you think that shitting on people publishing attacks is a good thing.
dmantis|1 month ago
You can be pretty sure some three-letter agency trash had been already using it around the world along with shady spyware startups.
gjsman-1000|1 month ago
You're assuming Hollywood studios would ever release their content without DRM of some kind. They were quite content to ignore computers entirely if they didn't bend.
The world where Widevine doesn't exist isn't a DRM free one; but a world where an iPad or Smart TV can stream and a PC can't. I would support giving them an award though for "most repeated invention that keeps failing."
OtomotO|1 month ago
Should issue the award!
cptaj|1 month ago
Most other professions have you take ethics classes, have ethics boards and even ethics legislation. We're severely lacking in this area as a community. It really shows when every year there's a new company building the Maximum Oppression Orb from the book Dont Build the Maximum Oppression Orb. Its like we're dealing with the moral equivalent of a mentally challenged person all the time
lotsofpulp|1 month ago
gjsman-1000|1 month ago
I also find it hard to get offended about because there is basically no job, outside of tech, which doesn't involve physical location. >95% of jobs require physical location. Do you think a concrete worker, a plumber, an electrician, or literally anyone who works with their hands, has a right to location privacy? What does that even mean? "I'm totally clocking in to work today and totally installing a light fixture for a client right now and I won't tell you which one"? "I'm totally making a cappuccino for an old lady right now at one of our 30,000 branches, but trust me, you don't need to know which one"? Whining about this is extremely hard for me to generate sympathies for.
pepperoni_pizza|1 month ago
xcf_seetan|1 month ago
kccqzy|1 month ago
However badging data is much more coarse-grained than WiFi. For one, because the building is large, you can’t tell which part of the office the employee is. For two, you can’t tell when the employee has left work because no badging is needed to exit the building.
samch|1 month ago
varispeed|1 month ago
voldemolt|1 month ago
Folks, let’s not beat around the bush: if you’re not your own boss, you don’t have agency and ultimately you have no control over the situation. The frustration is rooted in the lack of control, or at the very least in the lack of perception of cooperation that is a temporary substitute for agency and control (until the rug gets pulled from underneath them). It’s not Microsoft, it’s not Teams, it’s not AI. It’s not the person being promoted for doing this. It’s you. If it was your company, you could have put an end to it and changed the processes immediately. But it isn’t. So for having the privilege of working at whatever company you’re at, and getting paid whatever money you’re paid, you have to eat shit. This is the price you pay.
If you don’t want to eat shit from your bosses, you have to be your own boss. I think that’s as succinct and straightforward of a solution to things like these that you can find.
kitsune1|1 month ago
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al_borland|1 month ago
I don’t even allow location sharing with my own family on and ongoing basis.
mosselman|1 month ago
I also totally don't get why you would want to share your location, even with family. I don't want to know where they are either.
xoxxala|1 month ago
Hamuko|1 month ago
api|1 month ago
Linux is becoming more and more viable for a gaming PC. For business uses a Linux desktop is usable but probably not ideal, but you also have macOS. I'd pick anything but Windows and MS stuff.
djha-skin|1 month ago
Looks like I need to rename my home wifi to "Corporate Network."
smeej|1 month ago
I don't understand why this doesn't still work. If Dave from the office has access to your PC, presumably Dave and your PC are in the office, connected to your office's network, and thus it would appear that you are in the office?
Or is the assumption that you're carrying another device with you that would give you away? In which case, shouldn't the complaint be more about being forced to perform some kind of work task (like carrying/being accessible by your phone) when you're off the clock...which is hardly a new issue/complaint?
hsbauauvhabzb|1 month ago
alistairSH|1 month ago
Heck, my employer's entry system was already coupled to my phone's location (optional, but meant I didn't have to reserve a desk manually). So, I already looked like I was coming to the office on weekends because the grocery store is next door.
EDIT: not to mention Teams already shows your status as "Away" if you don't type for 5 minutes. Sitting there reading a document - yep, you're clearly smoking in the parking lot or wandering around gossiping.
SoftTalker|1 month ago
danesparza|1 month ago
bambax|1 month ago
But what if I have a secondary wifi network in my home that says "BigCorpSuperSecureWifi", wouldn't that work? What if that's the name of my phone's hotspot?
y-curious|1 month ago
pixl97|1 month ago
guluarte|1 month ago
this only works if you control the device and not managed by your company
absqueued|1 month ago
And phone dns always goes through pihole. Could this work in your case?
pogue|1 month ago
delusional|1 month ago
BrouteMinou|1 month ago
My manager has called me when I was doing a mid-day grocery and I just told him: "sorry for the noise, I am at the grocery store at the moment". This is absolutely no problem at all, he asked if I wanted to call back when I got home...
It's pretty much making a storm in a glass of water here.
That's karma farming by bitching the ebil Microsoft...
hsbauauvhabzb|1 month ago
lastofthemojito|1 month ago
ajcp|1 month ago
0. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
dehrmann|1 month ago
> And obviously, the mobile app (your pocket spy).
Don't these ask for location permissions? This story is light on details.
bri3d|1 month ago
I found a lot of news stories about this dating back to where it showed up on the roadmap in early 2025, but none of them with any more implementation details (ie - is it using _only_ WiFi network name, or some other data too?)
entuno|1 month ago
relaxing|1 month ago
midtake|1 month ago
Detrytus|1 month ago
palmotea|1 month ago
Is there anything more than the Wifi SSID stuff below?
> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network. So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly. You can’t hide behind a generic "Remote" status anymore.
So how exactly does this work? It'd be pretty trivial setup my access point to provide a work SSID? How much access does Teams really have to get info to discern your location?
iso1631|1 month ago
It sounds far less than the diagnostics data I get from a small go binary.
If corporate policy is you can't connect to starbucks wifi, then enforce that at the MDM mangement layer - I assume things like SCCM can do it.
shevy-java|1 month ago
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000306516/windows-11-is...
"Windows ist kaputt" = "Windows is broken"
And now 365 tracking people. So the whole company seems to now just be about sniffing after people. In the past it alleged at the least to enable folks, say, Win95 perhaps up to WinXP. Now somehow the customer became the enemy. It's really strange to see.
reloadtak|1 month ago
dleslie|1 month ago
xyst|1 month ago
Yet the contrarians here will always say "iTs bEtTeR wItHoUt uNiOn cuz I nEgoTiaTe beTtEr"
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
antaviana|1 month ago
storus|1 month ago
assaddayinh|1 month ago
salawat|1 month ago
Hint: Bossware and most things the MBA's drool over.
Unfortunately, there's enough people out there that are fine with implementing said features if it means they get a paycheck; even if it ruins the world for everyone else.
copilot_king|1 month ago
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aquir|1 month ago
re-lre-l|1 month ago
n3dm|1 month ago
stalfosknight|1 month ago
¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/NetworkExtension/N...
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
mixmastamyk|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
swgeek|1 month ago
What this does is track when you are not working in the office.
SoftTalker|1 month ago
entuno|1 month ago
Denied.
ahartmetz|1 month ago
stego-tech|1 month ago
The more data you collect, the bigger your legal liability when something inevitably goes pear-shaped.
Stop treating workers like grifters or prisoners and you won’t have nearly as many problems.
ngetchell|1 month ago
I know E911 was a big deal in the telephony world and since Teams is a phone service, this makes sense.
I don't like it but it makes sense.
galleywest200|1 month ago
newsoftheday|1 month ago
Artoooooor|1 month ago
uberman|1 month ago
jerlam|1 month ago
navane|1 month ago
mystifyingpoi|1 month ago
outside1234|1 month ago
cess11|1 month ago
parliament32|1 month ago
> If you connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't your company's, Teams will simply display the name of that network.
This is hallucinated. The actual change: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?id=488...
IF your 365 admins add a list of WiFi SSIDs to Teams, Teams will (optionally, opt-in by user) toggle your work location. It will not report not-known SSIDs to your manager or display it in Teams (but note your 365 admins have always been able to see this in the first place, in call/connectivity troubleshooting).
assaddayinh|1 month ago
wasmainiac|1 month ago
treetalker|1 month ago
WalterBright|1 month ago
tiku|1 month ago
lpcvoid|1 month ago
tibbydudeza|1 month ago
marekful|1 month ago
toomuchtodo|1 month ago
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/
whynotmaybe|1 month ago
If you install corporate teams on your personal device, you are part of the problem.
You must request a device for that and never mix personal and professional stuff.
iberator|1 month ago
Lazy and fraudulent people destroyed WFH. Should be banned forever. 20% people working, 80% slacking
dangus|1 month ago
Of course it does.
I don’t know that we can draw broad conclusions about worker rights on this issue.
My company probably DOES need to know that I’m not taking company information to certain locations like overseas if I work in certain industries like if I am in healthcare covered by HIPAA and I’m handling PHI.
Hyperbolic example, but if I’m taking a teams call or reading my email in North Korea, that is a gigantic problem.
Right to privacy doesn’t exist inside of employer apps and company devices, and there isn’t a strong argument that it should exist.
cheema33|1 month ago
Just go to the damn office already!!!
imglorp|1 month ago
It's about hiring adults, respecting and trusting them to do the job and support the team, and be responsible for their methods. The details are not important to that goal.
If an employer instead treats people like toddlers needing supervision, spoon feeding, and metrics around methods, not work, they will get only that.
SoftTalker|1 month ago
A lot of people are coming across as whiny children here, "Oh no I might have to go to the office for my 6-figure paycheck." Grow up and go to work, as George Carlin might say.
rapsacnz|1 month ago
Jamesbeam|1 month ago
If this is for people physically working at some place they have access controls and will see if you left the building, when and for how long.
So this is only good to track when your company phone leaves to the toilet. I imagine if they want to get rid of you they just set up a WiFi access point in the toilet and track your poop time. Then tell you to "optimize" your diet so you are more productive or get fired.
I mean it’s Microsoft the king of shitty features.
If this is for catching people working from home, just clone the WiFi and Mac on an OpenWRT 5g mobile router and take it with you and enjoy laughing at your boss while brunching with the whole team on company time.
Sometimes I think people forget that you borrow the company your (life)time and skills for the agreed terms. You’re not some kind of pig that is tracked until you’re fat enough to get butchered.
If your company turns this on, just look for a better workplace immediately that is actually respecting you as a human being and not "human capital" and tell them to get fucked.
durzo22|1 month ago
varispeed|1 month ago
observationist|1 month ago
Switch to Linux, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Say it's a security measure against spyware by malicious and hostile entities online.
lijok|1 month ago
jollyllama|1 month ago
SoftTalker|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
buckle8017|1 month ago
mahirsaid|1 month ago
lenerdenator|1 month ago
Looks like I need to remove Teams from my phone.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
dlenski|1 month ago
Add this to the infinite list of reasons why I don't put company-issued spyware on my personal devices. If Slack/Teams/Outlook/whatever wants to "administer" my personal device in any way, it's a hard no for me.
echelon_musk|1 month ago
Huh? If you're in the office already then your real time location is... the office. Makes 0 sense to me.
ezst|1 month ago
Insanity|1 month ago
newsoftheday|1 month ago
"The Bottom Line"
It reads like AI generated content, is it just me?
durzo22|1 month ago
reactordev|1 month ago
everdrive|1 month ago
gblar|1 month ago
eboy|1 month ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
SoftTalker|1 month ago