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.
Edit: from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827312, it does sound like the feature isn't really opt-in for end users though?
End users should not have an expectation of empowerment when using Teams or its predecessors... the administrator can override basically anything.
If you work in a large enterprise they already control everything—or have the capability.
Apologies you both have to deal with this.
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.
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...
Hence the explicit statement.
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?
Kind of like how Microsoft provides services to ICC judges until they won’t?
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
Given that not every device has built in GPS, it sounds like the Network Team is going to have to provide the locations of APs for that to work.
Curious how Teams will resolve that. If you're on your phone using a VPN back to your home network will it know or show you as at home? What happens if you have multiple APs at home?
The scary part is that your boss can question why you are the only one without location info.
Also, about choice: we like to pretend that people are free to choose where they work. They are; if there are no blocking consequences to that choice. For example, between working at Microsoft and letting my family starve? Well, I’ll bite the bullet. The market isn’t amazing, we can be much kinder on people for where they work.
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?)
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.
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.
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 will say that "IT knows where I am" and "my manager / manager's manager / whatever sees where I am on Teams" would represent two very different personal annoyance levels at most companies I've worked at; at most places I've worked getting someone's location through IT required them to be doing something questionable or illegal (ie - working from an unapproved country) or breaking some obnoxious return-to-office policy, not just "hey is Bob out to lunch again or is he over in Building 6 so I can drive-by him with some questions real quick"
IT having the information for security is one thing.
In the hands of power-hungry lower middle managers, it becomes a weapon.
But I'll agree that Teams is packaging this information into something more digest-able for middle managers, and that's the rub. There are always manager types who have the epiphany that not everyone is working 100% of the time and it bothers them enough to call it out to subordinates, or if they don't like someone enough they might do a deep dive with IT. Teams already has this indicator to show if you're online, on mobile, in a meeting, AFK, or offline entirely. Its not that the information wasn't there, its just much more front-and-center for managers to be annoying about it.
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.
Honestly, to me the feature seems so incredibly low-functionality that I'm surprised they're pushing it forward after all of the controversy it's generated. Like, sure, it might be nice to see if someone was out to lunch or in Building 17 or whatever without needing to message them, but at the cost of the whole "teams is spying on you" narrative and yuck-factor it pushes, I'm surprised they haven't pushed harder on either clarifying the functionality or just pulling it.
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
If a company policy says you have to opt in, not opting in means you're breaching the policy and might get fired. Entirely legal in at-will employment places, but potentially not in places with better worker protections.
Saying that, I just got announcement from my employer they will not be turning it on for now.
I mean, that's not really how "opt-in" works for features that your company owns; you might have to "opt-in" technically but your company will probably make that a little more mandatory.
I do agree that the blog post, headline, and HN comments are as usual quite an overreaction, but this feature is pretty gross. It's also weird because the controversy/grossness-to-utility ratio seems awful, which either means that Microsoft product management has gotten as bad as everyone thinks it has or there's some future plan to make it more "robust."
Can't you just rename your home wifi SSID to be whatever your Work wifi is called?
If I were to try to implement the given task description, I'd start with assuming this would need to be "Enterprise gives an exports of BSSIDs and locations, Teams uses that table to set the location when you connect to your organization's AP". I'm not even sure how else to make this really work right.
If it really is SSID based, the feature would be relatively useless for most organizations even before discussion trying to spoof it. E.g. the last place I worked had ~3,500 physical addresses with APs (and many more individual buildings/"office" names), all with the same "Corp_Name_Employee" SSID because otherwise it's way more work to have unique SSIDs. So how would this feature even do what it's supposed to do based on SSID?
(Or phone tether, if you have a good data plan)
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.
Ultimately if you are at the type of company which practices presenteeism, then the technology used is immaterial
Currently I manually check device IPs.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, MAC addresses can be spoofed, but that isn't going to be what most employees will do.
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.
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.
> what building you're in at the office
The really weird thing is going to be when people start internalizing the LLM voice and writing that way. It's probably happening already.
Eventually no space where people can just 'publish' things will be safe from being completely filled with LLM writing/video/images. The only way to combat it is by forcing people to get punished for this behaviour and making it difficult to circumvent.
Some invite system where people get punished for the bad people they bring in, one that's linked to your identity/workplace/education. Even if these options were available, I doubt many people would care enough, they'd rather be in 'enshittified ' spaces.
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.
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...
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.)
Some of Sweeney's most well-known work in this area is from the LATE 1990s. She was sounding the alarm about problems with anonymized data in medical datasets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney#Medical_datase...
Her work almost certainly contributed highly to awareness of these risks.
More recently she has apparently worked on things like protecting voting rights in the US by notifying voters if their registration records change.
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 can be pretty sure some three-letter agency trash had been already using it around the world along with shady spyware startups.
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."
Should issue the award!
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
The requirements for this sort of stuff come from top down. Do you expect C-Level and and the top layers of sycophants beneath them to be ethical?
I don't see it anywhere.
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.
Overall it's just kind of a yucky and weird feature; when I worked in an office I really didn't really want my coworkers having a real-time automated feed about where I'm located and one of my chores as a manager was always picking a seating position where I could at least take the drive-by questions before my team got interrupted, which stuff like this bypasses. I could actually see it being useful for field-deployed employees but it's not part of the stated implementation and most people in that scenario already have a solution for that.
I agree that the typical HN-meltdown isn't warranted here; the HN Meltdown Factor on anything related to privacy, cryptography, and security lately has gotten really out of hand (the post you're replying to is a perfect example, actually). But I also don't think these counterpoints are very strong; they're justifying other useful features and products that almost everyone already has. It's weird to me that Microsoft haven't either clarified or backed down on this one given how much press it's gotten vs. the seemingly tiny advantage the feature presents.
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.
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.
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.
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?
this only works if you control the device and not managed by your company
And phone dns always goes through pihole. Could this work in your case?
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.
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?)
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?
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.
So it sounds like if you want to circumvent this: get a travel router that spoofs a work access point, and make sure any kind of identification requests that would reveal a public IP are either blocked or are going through your work VPN.
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.
Yet the contrarians here will always say "iTs bEtTeR wItHoUt uNiOn cuz I nEgoTiaTe beTtEr"
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.
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).
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.
Lazy and fraudulent people destroyed WFH. Should be banned forever. 20% people working, 80% slacking
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.
Just go to the damn office already!!!
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.
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.
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?