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.
I think the takeaway from this article, and I may be wrong, is that Teams uses location to report where you’re logging in from. This is something most corporate networks report anyway for safety.
This isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of Work From Home employees. Most have home offices, and most will make their team or managers aware if they’re logging in from a new location, or everyone is using a robust VPN to connect anyway so it hardly matters.
This is going to fuck over people who are exploiting WFH to say, work two jobs (Yes, it is more common than you think) or people who went on vacation with their family and didn’t want to take PTO so they are trying to log in to join team meetings from the hotel lobby or something.
If your company is so draconian about your login location and you’re hiding where you’re working from, maybe consider changing habits or changing employer.
can you explain how this would catch people working two jobs esp if they are both WFH jobs?
It gets strange when you are using their cloud services though. You don’t really need a VPN to use teams web interface, it should be secure by default. Will Linux leak my location when using teams? I don’t know.
Or if I am using virtual desktops in azure, often with a secondary hop to a remote desktop somewhere that is running teams. At this point what are we logging and what location am I really at?
As a side note: all of this effort by microsoft is annoying. Bring your own device is so freeing and cost saving, but it makes the situation I described above.
I work on windows all day, but I don’t personally have any. And I like it that way.