Only one team working to make Teams worse???
They have achieved higher productivity by not using teams themselves.
You’ve got it reversed. Switching to Teams greatly hastened development, as the team’s newfound vitriol and frustration could be channeled toward the end user in a neverending feedback loop.
Literally! They were told to return to office to achieve higher productivity (it was circling the news around September?)
It was obviously just a corpo stealth layoff but imagine being told as a Teams developer that Teams is not good enough for remote work
They’re asking Copilot for help, so have achieved 10x productivity.
This is what I gathered on the subject, feel free to correct if anything is wrong:
The WiFi tracking works by scanning for nearby WiFi networks, identifying which routers are nearby and their signal strengths, matching those against their database of known WiFi access points, and using that data to estimate your location.
For now the feature will be off by default, first has to be enabled by your company, and then the user has to opt in for it to be used.
For those who are required to use Microsoft products, it can by bypassed by using a wired Ethernet connection and not using Teams on any devices using a wireless connection.
Edit: As @lividweasel@lemmy.world pointed out, Microsoft is not using WiFi positioning systems to determine location, but rather updating your location to “in the office” or not depending on whether your device is connected to one of the organization’s WiFi SSIDs.
same go for the web browser based teams, or is this just the “app”?
The browser version shouldn’t be able to access this info.
Until Edge updates and silently turns it on
Unlikely, browser vendors are very careful adding such APIs, and MS doesn’t have the pull Google does.
A simple fix is, of course, not to use Edge.
That doesn’t at all match the documentation.
The organization will configure a list of Wi-Fi SSIDs. When your device connects to one of those, the Teams location would be updated to “in the office”.
That’s it. No complex triangulation, no pinpoint locating. Just “are you connected to the office network or not”.
Also, if you don’t want to be tracked in this way, just don’t participate. If your organization sets a policy to opt you in automatically, click the option to opt out. If they give the offer to opt in, just don’t.
I know it’s hip to hate on Microsoft, but we should at least discuss things based on the truth, not wild assumptions and misinformation.
Thanks for the clarification. I wrongly assumed Microsoft was using Wi-Fi positioning systems (which is used for geolocation, just not in this particular case) instead of reading their documentation.
I’ll update the comment.
I also don’t think most workplaces are going to punish you for opting out of this feature even if organizational policy requires it to be enabled.
So basically the same every Android phone does. Google has done this kind of tracking since 2007
I look forward to this feature being deployed in hospitals. It’s going to fail so hard and generate so many tickets.
“Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in.”
If you require someone to opt-in, they’re no longer “opting in”
I swear people do not understand the point of what microsoft does.
There isn’t a team tasked with making teams worse. They’re tasked with extracting all possible value out of their product. Part of that value is infromation like where you are, what you’re doing, what you’re talking about, what you search for, what you actually do for your job, who is around you, what they talk about, where they are, what they are doing, what they search for, and what they do for their job and how everyone spends their money.
All of this is incredibly valuable data to governments, businesses and private individuals that want to advertise, suppress dissenting political voices, enhance useful dissenting political voices, and otherwise manipulate global influence.
They just don’t want you to think about declining any permissions, triggering regulatory action, or switching to another platform.
That’s true. Their mission is not explicitly to make it worse, but to continually maximize value at all costs. Eventually, software usability has to be one of the costs.
Same thing with extra steps.
”Eventually”
As if Teams was ever a usable product.
Which is what LinkedIn is for by the way. In terms of data gathering. And to keep you on the platform.
The various news sites out there that want to spread their own version of influence and generate their own revenue take this kind of information and use it to see how you click on things, what drives your engagement, what you will go on to share with others, and how you talk about all of it. It’s all tied together.
Big money interests run basically everything in this world. We are just cattle, we will always be just cattle. I’m in countless databases like all of you, and we’re all fucked by the system we think we might some day to cheat our way above the other rats. The noose is tied tight though… there’s not much room left to struggle. It’s too late to escape it. Palantir and Flock are here to close the loop and they aren’t going anywhere, even if the street cameras are likely to be hidden in the future and more tamper proof rather than obvious to the public. Doesn’t matter if the laws change to ban it or you can convince local government to not get involved with it - it’s way too easy to hide cameras with modern technology. Just give it time and your credit score and auto insurance will incorporate flock data ;)
Insurance is already pushing in-car monitoring for discounts.
They’re already paying all the manufacturers for the driver telemetry anyway, probably through third party brokers because everything must be obfuscated.
I think they like having multiple layers of confirmation that way if one is regulated away for some reason like ‘privacy’ or ‘technically anyone could be driving’ then they have fallbacks and legal deniability for the data being inherently flawed.
Which is what LinkedIn is for by the way. In terms of data gathering. And to keep you on the platform.
So glad I only use Teams in a browser, fuck this bullshit.
Don’t install Teams.
Teams comes pre installed with windows these days.
I recommend KDE Plasma on any linux distribution that comes with it for people interested in recovering their digital sovereignty.
If people moved to Linux and used FOSS software, these privacy violations wouldn’t even be a problem.
If people moved to Linux
When users connect to their organization’s WiFi…
You think my employer would let me use Linux? Creeping on employees is how management feels important.
I wouldn’t use Teams personally unless under extreme duress. Unfortunately professionally it is the norm.
There is a difference betwen the version for corporate (MS365 Business) and the consumer version.
Yes, they have the same name.
Yes, it’s confusing.
You can’t even install it on Linux, they killed the native app years ago and now tell you to use the browser version
And then every link asks if you want to open in app, three extra clicks but worth it
The Linux client never worked in my experience anyway. In no coincidence, their Teams in browser never seemed to work in Linux either until a little after they killed the native app. I wonder if there were enough important clients that needed support for it and they caved and made it work.
Having Teams remind you that, during session recordings, your video and what you say can be used by Microsoft for whatever purpose they want, including (but not limited to) training AI.
This wasn’t the line that was crossed? Seeing/hearing your likeness in the next generated AI / copilot commercial, because you needed to consent in order to work. This is “fine” /s
… but having Microsoft know that you’re answering Teams messages while on the toilet… yeah, that’s where “the line gets crossed” (eyeroll)
We need to wake-up and drop this technological cancer.
edit: a word
“It’s okay, because it’s Microsoft” is management’s response when I raise a concern at work.
Heaven forbid you use an open source tool that isn’t on the software whitelist yet
This is illegal in Norway :)
Microsoft: Our product is not our software. It’s you!
I’m their software?
I’m their software?
They’ve crossed the line a long long time ago. All microslop products are straight up unusable.
Honestly, I would screen potential employers by whether they are a Microsoft shop or not. Fuck ‘em.
i thought the same, but now working at a place using google/slack/zoom isn’t much better. pretty much all corporate software is feature creep bloated slop these days.
The users aren’t the customers. The customers are the users’ bosses.
Of course there is, this guy leads it
I wonder if the team that is tasked with making teams worse has team meetings with the whole team on teams.
Yesterday I read on here that Microsoft doesn’t let their teams use Teams.
There have been teams at Microsoft making everything worse since 1998. Why is this news?
And is why we don’t use Microsoft products.
