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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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.

I don’t even allow location sharing with my own family on and ongoing basis.

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.

Looks like I need to rename my home wifi to "Corporate Network."

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?

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.

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?

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...

> And obviously, the mobile app (your pocket spy).

Don't these ask for location permissions? This story is light on details.

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.

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?

Yet the contrarians here will always say "iTs bEtTeR wItHoUt uNiOn cuz I nEgoTiaTe beTtEr"

¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/NetworkExtension/N...

What this does is track when you are not working in the office.

Denied.

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.

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.

> 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).

Just go to the damn office already!!!

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.

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.

Looks like I need to remove Teams from my phone.

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.

Huh? If you're in the office already then your real time location is... the office. Makes 0 sense to me.

"The Bottom Line"

It reads like AI generated content, is it just me?