When a new feature sounds scary, but isn’t anything worth worrying about

I’m sure many of you saw the outraged headlines about how Teams was going to start ratting you out to your boss when you were working outside the office.

As someone who’s worked in IT for years, I was puzzled by the alarm.

This relates to a new Teams feature that automatically sets your work location when you connect to a known office wifi.

Tony Redmond does a good job describing it, but let me add this bit.

If you don’t realize that your employer’s IT folks already have a dozen different ways to tell whether you’re logged in to the office wifi or not, you’re kidding yourselves. We didn’t need Teams to start ratting out employees. All we had to do was monitor the Wifi access points and match up your MAC address. Heck, we can look up your IP address anytime we want, too. Your machine is likely already being monitored; if they want it to report your location, they are already reporting it. You don’t see it.

So yeah, Teams automatically setting your location isn’t something I voted for, but it’s not the privacy risk you think it is. Save the outrage for when Microsoft does something egregious, which I’m sure they will eventually.

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