Look, we all knew it was coming, but now it’s official. Microsoft just handed middle managers the ultimate weapon. Their new update for Microsoft 365 allows companies to track exactly where you are, and the days of pretending to be at your desk are over.
Your IP address can be correlated with your location without needing this Microsoft cruft. Combine this with MDM and badge reader logs and your employer already has all the information they need to track you.
While making this easier to access isn’t a positive, there are a ton of ways that this can, and already is, being done at companies that actually care about this shit.
Yeah you’re totally in the office, but your laptop just magically has an IP from the subnet for devices connected over VPN 🙄
Once again I must insist that people need to stop expecting any privacy on work devices. It is possible to find out anything on them, including location, it’s just a matter of how much effort your workplace is willing to expend on looking.
Edit: While I appreciate the article being short and to the point, a link to any documentation on this would have been nice. The claim is that it will display the SSID of the Wi-Fi AP you’re connected to. While being able to get that from your phone is a new bit of reach, it’s possible to gather that from work devices easily.
just use vpn all the time, even when at your desk in the office
This will break a lot of applications.
That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.
Our VPN gateway is different if you are already on the internal network.
That’s why I send passive aggressive messages about my company on my work computer. Hopefully they see me laughing at their incompetence and obvious nepotism.
We’ll, uh, see how it works out.
This is what many of us warned against already 20 years ago. It’s one of the inherent dangers of ALL proprietary software.
Back then most people didn’t believe or understand it, now that such dangers are out in the open, nothing continues to happen about it.
Everybody knows today, but (almost) nobody gives a shit.Member when “the government is listening!” Was ‘just crazy paranoids’?
Yeah.
People in the 90s and early 2000s were the ones most paranoid about that. I don’t think people in the 60s were anywhere near as worried or aware of wiretaps.
Back then the reality was more “the government wish they had the power to listen to everything” and now that they have the power, no one believes it because it was previously ridiculous to think they were already doing it.
The conspiracy was just ahead of its time.
I mean ECHELON was reading satellite traffic in the 70s. Although now we call it Five Eyes. Encryption for regular people just wasn’t a thing until the 90s. Still isn’t for 90% of everyone on most platforms.
Microsnitch
This shit makes my job harder. I am required by law to provide a PSAP with the location data of any 911 caller (within a pretty tight radius). I have to use software in concert with softphones which requires the user enter their location when logging in the phone on their computer, just in case it is used to dial 911. This isn’t optional, we could face serious legal penalties if a user dials 911 and the response is delayed because the responders go to the wrong place.
My stuff is only used for 911. We don’t keep track. Really. There’s not even a mechanism to do that.
But when MS pulls this invasive bullshit it makes people afraid that my 911 software is doing the same thing. It makes them lie on the form or refuse to put anything in it. It makes them less safe and it makes my life difficult trying to convince them that the software we are using really is just for safety and that nobody, not even me, has access to it.
It doesn’t help that pretty much every single thing that has ever been done in the name of “safety” in America has eventually been used to rip us off or harm us in some way, and that isn’t even counting the fake shit that was a fraud from the get-go (like the patriot act and the like).
That sounds like such a drain.
The lack of a source in that article led me to go looking for something official. Here’s the MS article on the feature: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/places/configure-auto-detect-work-location
What jumped out at me (called out twice in dedicated boxes):
By default, users are opted out of work location detection. Users are prompted to provide consent for automatic location detection in the Teams desktop client on Windows or macOS. It is not possible for admins to consent on users’ behalf.
This just doesn’t seem like as big of a deal as some are making it sound.
By default users are opted out…
… unless your company admin overrides that choice with a policy and force enables it.
Why is it a bad thing that employees can’t pretend to do something they’re not?
If you’re doing a good job, managers don’t care if you spend the afternoon at a café.
/ex manager
good managers don’t care.
That’s why you leave your work laptop at work and tunnel in from home!
Uninstalled. You can use these apps in a chromium browser, where you control what it can use.
Exactly. When I have to interact with Microsoft, I feel best keeping it in a browser.
For work/school I keep it all in Edge. So I keep all the garbage in the same bin 🤣
So it
Looks like a broken link.
I edited it, thank you for alerting me.
This has been in Teams for years. Let’s be serious if your boss actually cares then get a different job or a different fucking boss.
Great job MS. This is illegal here.
It’s only illegal if “here” files a lawsuit against Microsoft.
Will it?
Use Teams in the web browser instead of the Edge Webview wrapper client?
It’s trivial to set your SSID and AP’s MAC address to match whatever they’re looking for.
Good thing my manager isn’t a piece of shit.
Also, I have it blocked on all my stuff because fuck off with your tracking.
how block? Firewall rules?
You just turn it off in settings, but I also run a VPN and have the permissions denied at the OS level on my phone (Android 16). On my personal computer, I only use web apps when it comes to work stuff, and on my work computer, I have all location settings turned off for OS and apps (but I am an admin and work in IT).
