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Watch out, Microsoft Outlook could soon give away when you're sneakily working from home
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Interesting. Teams has been doing this for a few years now, so I assume it's the same functionality just transferred over to Outlook (which has been going through a massive overhaul recently). For anyone in an MS-based company with Teams being actively used, this is not a new thing.
How does Teams give away your location? I've used it extensively, but I've never seen someone's location unless the enter it manually.
It can be turned on by the IT dept in a large office. It has a different icon for in office network connection vs not. Not every IT dept uses it. Some treat other employees like adults, for instance.
Having my status turn yellow when I so much as look away from my screen is bad enough. I really hope this "feature" stays off.
And this is why I haven't installed Teams on my personal computer. If it was less invasive, I would, but it's just potential bossware masquerading as "productivity tools."
That shit stays on my work computer, and I just VPN into it.
I'm not putting any work stuff on by home computer. I'm not giving work admin rights to that.
It should be noted that work location is a self report tool designed to make collaboration easier so colleagues can know where you are and potentially align their work from home schedules with yours.
It isn't a spy tool that tracks where you are. It's basically just an optional tag that you can add to your calendar if you want.
We use a slack app for the same purpose, and it works great.
It's not just a self reporting feature it seems. Our IT accidentally turned it on (as I understand) for a day by adding building info to one of the supervisors account. It then showed if you were in the same location (building) than your supervisor.
Do you mean it used the information from AD/Entra or was it tracking you?
I do not know if the setting is an Entra setting, I don't have access. I'm just friendly with IT. This is what I believe they were talking about given their description. But not tracking, no. It's basically a here/not here situation. You're either tethered to local networking or not.
Do VPNs make that feature kind of pointless? We can't access most things from home without going through a VPN. Every where I've worked (and gone to school) was like that.
At a lower level your IT dept logs the IP address you’re accessing m365 resources from.
Yes the security logs absolutely log that, but I haven't heard of HR forcing IT to actually use those logs for discovering where people work.
We don't give a shit and have better things to do.