Posted on 10/26/2025 8:31:13 PM PDT by bitt
Teams will start tracking office attendance and yes, your boss will know
Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker’s location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you’re actually there or not.
From a boss’ perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you.
How does it tattle?
As per the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." And the location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting.
Not much more detail is given, but I can try to fill in some gaps here.
There’s already an option in Teams to set your work location, which is (for now) being used to help identify where you are in, say, a large office or a campus. It’s my suspicion that this could be automated based on Wi-Fi details like IP address, to change based on what your system is connected to.
Looking back at the roadmap, this is set to launch both on Windows and macOS, and the rollout starts at the end of this year. “This feature will be off by default,” reads the announcement — good news for those who have non-techie bosses. But “tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in.” Ouch.
What can we learn from the history of skipping the office?
(Excerpt) Read more at tomsguide.com ...
P
Microsnitch.
Teams will show me in my home office as usual. The icon already turns yellow if there has been no keyboard or mouse action in the last 5 minutes. This new feature must be in response to the scripts or applets used to simulate “busyness”.
Exactly.
Dave, it’s 10:50 AM. I’m afraid I’ll have to tase you. zaaaap
Heh, good ideas!
Go ahead. See if I care. 😂😂😂
I retired in June this year, so all of that nonsense is no longer an issue. I haven't set foot in a company building since Sept 2017 on the last trip to San Diego. The company maintained a VPN for access to company resources. That bypassed the originating IP address issue that granted access to a select few servers. The VPN bandwidth was massively increased during COVID and working from home became the normal mode for work that wasn't explicitly in a DoD "closed" area. There was adequate security in authentication, authorization and end-to-end encrypted sessions.
Lol! Ingenious. Why haven’t I thought of that before?
If your boss doesn’t know your whereabouts when you’re on the job, then he shouldn’t be your boss.
ditto
I hate MS TEAMS.

Whats the old saying? “Microsnitches get Microstiches”?
A 1995 episode!
Can it tell if you’re eating Twinkies?
Ha.
Reminds me of the shore scene from the movie On the Beach, where they discover the nature of the repeating transmission.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.