A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
Hold on. Let me say this.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
I work in IT support and I’ll say that this isn’t really anything that couldn’t be done before, is just more visible. Office 365 logs what device and app you’re using to connect, the IP address of the requester, what you were requesting from which service… The list is long. It’s a massive amount of data that largely, nobody cares about.
The only time I even look at that information is when some security software flags some action as suspicious, then, and only then, do I even bother.
If you go on vacation and suddenly connect from Florida when you are normally connecting from the UK, I get a notification. If you suddenly start using a well known VPN, I get a notification. The logic is for security. If you suddenly log in from a new place, then it’s more likely that the login in question wasn’t you, and you’ve been hijacked. That’s literally my only interest in your location. Most bosses don’t give a shit either.
Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways
Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it’ll send a notice to the boss that you’re being remote
It updates your location status to “in the office”
It also changes to “away” if you don’t move the mouse for long enough.
Anyone looking to these as workers not doing their job, is looking in the wrong place.
I hope Teams announces when my CEO and other executives are not in the office. Just to level the field.
Well i guess i am lucky because my laptop remains on site and i connect to vdi and then rdp to my laptop. (When working from home) so the data will be meaningless. At least in my case.
As always it’s the worst product that got the most marketing that gets used by everyone.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Apparently it’s dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
I think it’s more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
Meanwhile, they cannot or will not add useful features like…being able to have more than one fucking person share a screen. This is after YEARS of lockdown.
And don’t get me started on how basic their chat “feature” is. I mean…have they even bothered to look at Slack at all? And it’s not like Slack is the only one they might look at…how about Matrix/Riot?
Nope, it’s almost like they just know millions of users are stuck with their craptastic solution because it’s bundled into the rest of their stack and enterprises are going with it no matter how much it sucks balls.
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In general, that type of multiple job work is both jobs being work from home. I don’t think anyone home officing a desk job is going to do minimum wage work on the side.
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It would fuck over people who are straw employees where someone else is doing the work but that’s kind of the opposite scenario. There was a story recently about a lot of San Francisco tech startups all hiring the same programmer thinking he was exclusive to them (stock options involved?). Apparently the work was getting done, but didn’t meet their expectations of the type of employee they were hiring.
Another feature no one asked for.
Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.
Not by workers, but it was asked for.
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You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
No. I’m sure managers asked for this…
Maybe I’m dating myself, but it still seems incredible to me that a relatively small update to the location features in one piece of software triggers news articles about the broader societal implications.
Software has too much power over our lives.
And it’s a terrible piece of software at that.
Maybe, but M$ has had quite an impact over office life for quite some time, and it seems like nearly every org is still paying the M$ tax, even after all these years. Teams is part of that stack, and while I don’t know anyone tech-savvy that actually likes it for anything it supposedly solves, it gets used anyway. It is terrible as an IM client. Only one user at a time can share a screen, so it’s terrible at any real collab, also. But it integrates with Outlook for scheduling meetings, so…
In addition, it seems like it is almost intentionally user-hostile when it comes to setting up prefs, like disabling incoming video as a default. This is a feature I’ve seen asked for over 5 years ago. When everyone was stuck at home and sometimes on rather slow/unreliable networks, Microsoft makes you disable incoming video on every single new Teams session, from all the geniuses that felt they were important enough to have their camera on all the time for no real reason.
Now you’d think they would have adapted to something like this, and turned this around very quickly at the beginning of Covid, as not only was it requested from users, but it would make a lot of sense (and maybe it lightens their servers load, too? Although I imagine video feeds don’t get streamed through their servers?) and probably be a decent workaround to having audio properly work on slow/bursty network connections, etc.
And yet…I still don’t see the feature as an option. I think I saw an answer about some setting that could be done globally or in a policy, as if that is really the answer. Again, it seems like it is software aimed at being sold to control freaks who also care nothing about the user experience of their captured user base. So, 5 years later, I get to disable incoming video on each call if some inconsiderate person has their video on.
To be fair, Microsoft never had “Don’t be evil” as their motto.
Bill Gates was an asshole from the start. Happy to use freely available stuff from the early computing community as well as using his school’s resources to build either DOS or BASIC and then acting like he had built it all with his own resources when ranting about free software. To be clear, I don’t gaf about using free resources to build something and make money from it, but his hypocrisy and anti-competitive BS makes that aspect worse with him.
So it was always shit, it was just that once upon a time, they actually had to make good software that ran on very limited hardware in addition to their anti-competitive BS, and then had a period where they kept trying to make good software but didn’t realize yet that they didn’t need to (like windows ME was pretty much universally panned, but it didn’t drive people away from windows in general).
I think it was win 10 that I first felt like I was in conflict with my OS. Like in win 7, I’d spend time looking at each update’s kdb entry to decide if I wanted it (and skipped the nagware ones about win 10 entirely, for example). In win 10, I had to jump through hoops just to be able to control when it applied updates on my own timeline, not MS’. Win 10 was the worst for resetting settings, like I get it set up like I prefer it to be, then a few updates later I’d have to do some of them again. Though tbf, I don’t recall that happening in the last few years, but other worse enshitification has settled in since then and now windows never even touched my current main machine.
Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.
Don’t be surprised when IT tries to move into your house thinking it is an office building
I actually wouldn’t mind this at all. Where I work, we have an office but most people are only in one or two days a week. I try to keep to a schedule, but some weeks I have to move my office days around. When my schedule changes, I update my Teams location so people know where I am, but I wouldn’t mind opting in to do it automatically.
But then again, my boss doesn’t really care where I do my work, as long as it gets done. Not everyone has the luxury of a boss who isn’t an asshat. If you are working in a place where you have to hide your work-from-home time, you should be looking for a new job.
Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.
Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like… “sure!”
Now when I’m in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I’m WFH or elsewhere it tells people I’m not in the building. I don’t get people asking “hey are you in today?”
A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it’s “are you online or away?”. No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.
The company your work for is Microsoft’s biggest client - not you… Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.
Teams/outlook has been doing this for a while. This is likely more for making it easier to see who is in the office to coordinate in person stuff like meetings and lunch.
If you want to be creeped out by Teams and other similar services, it can
- Detect if a conference room is in use even when not being used for a teams/zoom call.
- detect your voice and attach it to a transcript.
- detect your face to assign you name to a teams meeting in a conference room with other people in the room.
