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Microsoft Teams is getting a controversial location tracking feature that users may hate (www.neowin.net)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -28 points 3 months ago* (45 children)

I work in a big office, I want to know if the person is in office, working from home or offsite somewhere. This feature will automatically update the status to give that info. I dont see how its hard to understand why that is a useful feature. Also I said enterprise environment its assumed these are company devices.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 months ago (29 children)

    I have never once had an issue with this.

    Know why? Because I work with responsible adults. Once you start treating adults like little kids with no agency, you’re opening the floodgates for the control schemes which finally start to affect you personally.

    What could your employer do that would overstep your personal boundaries? By handwaving this one away, you’re enabling them to cross your line later. You must see that, yes? It’s clear to everyone else.

    You are not doing yourself any service, even if you think you’re just “sitting this one out.”

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  • [+] -18 points 3 months ago (27 children)

    Im glad that people in your office are responsible enough to keep their teams status updated but many don't and in a big company with majority hybrid workers this will be a useful feature and I look forward to it being enabled since im always in office.

    Your comment is wild I have to ask what you think you're fighting here? How does updating a teams status to display if you're working in the office or at home over step boundaries and open the floodgates for big scary control schemes? If its a company device this changes nothing, if they want to track your location they wont be using this teams feature. if they want to micromanage you or spy on you they wont be using this teams feature.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    If you can’t see it, it’s either willful ignorance or a chasm too wide for me.

    Best of luck, you’re going to need it

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago

    You just have no idea and are lashing out at things you dont understand. You havent even read the article. There is no privacy issue here its not Microsoft tracking any more than they already do and its not employer tracking.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    i've worked in multiple organisations of over 100 000 employees with majority hybrid workers and this has never come up. can you explain what positives this information will give you?

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    To see if someone's in office. Example you book a meeting and you check the event in outlook and it shows that everyone's in office today so you can grab a meeting room and do it in person.

    Someone raises a ticket for an issue thats easy to solve manually and you see theyre in tbe office so you go fix it.

    Someone is looking for your coworker and you check teams and see hes working over at site B

    How can you not see what positive info this would give? Have you never asked someone if they are in the office today, I would find that pretty hard to believe.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago*

    no i haven't, because i have access to an asynchronous communication medium with which i can get the information i need from people in text form. when working in international teams every meeting is online anyway and tickets are usually resolved by either development or fixes to the online system. someone needing onsite help would constitute an emergency.

    the only info i need from status lines is whether someone is on vacation or not.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    If only you had access to a piece of communications software with which you could ask your coworkers if they’re in the office or not, and when they’re likely to be.

    Maybe MS could make one of those that worked.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Are you trying to say that messaging a co worker to see if theyre in the office is quicker than checking their status?

    You're welcome to continue doing that but that sounds awful and I doubt you'll do it once this rollsout.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    what moron cares about updated teams statuses? that sounds like such a painful office environment

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (14 children)

    No one cares enough to update them thats the point but its still useful to be able to check at a glance if someone is wfh or not. I'm sorry this is such a challenging concept to you to grasp.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (9 children)

    the part that is challenging to me is why anyone expects that to actually work?

    have you been paying attention for the last 20+ years now?

    i want to say there was maybe a period of 5 years around mid 2000 where it did but microslop has been awful for decades

    and i can count on 2 hands the number of times the issue was urgent enough to need an immediate response regardless of what middle management thinks (and phone calls worked fine)

    so over working for bigcap company cultures and middle managers having too little actual work

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    By that logic dont bother implementing anything because what if it doesnt work.

    It'll work good enough for most and better than the current status situation.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

    or you know stop using overpriced miroshit products

    pay your workers well and treat them like adults

    and cut useless middle management

    sadly my company still uses ms but at least they nail the other two

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    You hate MS, I do as well but its not relevant to talk about throwing it all out. This is just about a minor feature release and lemmys overreaction.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    ms literally pushed a vibe coded update that boot lopped multiple dev machines for a week before we resolved it

    technically it was fixed same day but only because we have regular nightly images and other machines

    that alone should be enough of a reason, this is just more shit on the camel’s back

    but so you know I’m not downvoting you, nothing you've said is unreasonable, I just really have no patience with current tech companies and clearly lemmy is sick of ms’ shit

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (3 children)

    Microsoft pushing a bad update and breaking dev machines is an issue with your it department. Every single OS pushes bad updates thats why you stagger your releases through rings so you can catch the issues early and minimise downtime.

    Imagine if we stopped using linux because of a bad update.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    don’t act like this is normal

    i can’t think of a linux release in the 22+ years that’s had a non recoverable boot loop

    and who says it wasn’t staggered? doesn’t do a damn thing for those in the release group

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    You just said you recovered the windows boot loop.

    Linux breaks booting all the time. Its so common its every linux user knows how to fix it. Pick the distro and you'll find tons of boot issues after major updates.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    yea recovered by reinstalling an image from before the update, the system was a complete brick otherwise

    it took microslop 3 weeks to fix their shit, google it if you are confused, it wasn’t a limited hardware exposure issue, it was bad code

    we’ve been running rhel stable for decades with never a single example like this, i’m not talking about one off hiccups, i’m talking about the entire main line being busted

    pulling an example of loops from some random linux unstable distro or beta is meaningless

    to claim otherwise is bullshit, again this is not normal, even ms hasn’t been this bad since early vista

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why? Work from home, not work from home, the works the same. I can't understand how this changes how you work. Unless your employer is very bad at figuring out how to do it. That is the only conclusion one can come to.

    Your work does a poor job, so you rely on outdated work methods. There is no other way to look at this.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    If they're in the office we can talk face to face if theyre at home we teams call. You are actually beyond cooked if you're unable to understand this.

    If your job is as simple as receive instruction return output then I see how this doesnt change much but thats not every job.

    If you don't talk to people why even have an office? This change isnt for fully remote workplaces.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    And you are demonstrating terrible work habits.

    It should not change how you work. That is the problem, for some reason it does for you, meaning your work, or you, do not know how to work efficiently.

    And to be fair, if your work doesn't fix this problem it really isn't your fault. They should be nipping this crap in the bud and calling it out. Re-training people and getting productive.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago

    You still havent given a single reason. You just spout the same shit over and over as if you're some authority on the topic and we should all just believe things are the way you say they are.

    Im sure you are very hard to work with and once this feature is rolled out you'll still get no one coming by your desk.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Because working from home doesn't really mean you have to be in your house as long as you're working. Just like you don't have to actually eat on your lunch break. If you can't trust me then why am I still working for you?

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  • [+] -13 points 3 months ago

    Ignoring that this wont update your status to "In a coffee shop" for argument sake lets pretend it does.

    If your work allows you to work from a coffee shop and your status reflects that then whats the issue? If you aren't allowed then why are you working from a coffee shop. This doesnt make sense as an argument. Plenty of people have in their contract strict policy for work from home. My job would not allow work to be done outside office, home or specific sites. We have people who are allowed to work in coffee shops and airports and they get laptops with privacy screens and are told to not access sensitive information in those locations.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Two reasons:

    1. The feature likely won't work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that's when your boss's boss checks your location and it says you're working from home or something. And now you get written up because you're supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens--a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won't consider the limitations).

    2. You're assuming they're only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn't/couldn't install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I had a boss that would teams-call me when I was on the toilet. I don’t think it was malicious, just inconvenient. He was a dick about it though, so maybe he was watching my status.

    The Authenticator app is one of the the least invasive pieces of software you could install on your phone, so you’re on your own there. But we just get a Yubikey and it’s their problem.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago

    1. Leave your device? But really you'll be able to say you were getting lunch and since you return 10mins later they'll see you're in the office. If they dont accept that then you'd be cooked with or without this feature.

    2. Saying neither MS or your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more is a stupid point considering that both parties already have access to more information than this feature will provide. If they are bringing a personal device its probably already registered into some MDM software for basic device management of company assets and that provides them with more control than this will. If they dont then the company is probably to small and not interested in gathering this info or doing anything with it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Why do you want to know that? Haven't figured out how to work asymmetrically or put things into writing?

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    You do realise talking face to face is objectively better than talking over zoom or text right? I dont know why you keep acting this stupid all over the thread.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    No. It objectively is not. It may seem like it, but for all the reasons I have mentioned it absolutely is not.

    Its poor training and lack of ability to function in this space that makes you think so.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Oh yes all the 0 reasons you mentioned. How could I forget such a convincing argument.

    I'm thinking that you may have a social disability and be misunderstanding. This is not for every worker. If you work better communicating over text thats fine your business can accommodate you. But majority of humans communicate best face to face instead of over text or calls. Its not to say you can't effectively communicate over those mediums.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I mentioned the reasons before.

    What you are suggesting doesn't scale. It doesn't work well for large orgnizations. It also hinders smaller ones because they never learn the skills to do it more effectively.

    It is a learned practice. It does take effort but the rewards are many.

    Yes I talk about this as so what of an authority. I have written on this subject, measured outcomes, created manuals and guides and trained people.

    If you want good talent it isn't all going to be in one place and we have the technology and tools to work with people anywhere and with some guidelines and rules: anytime. That is a huge win.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Works fine in multinationals that I've worked for. Are you telling me that if you've got 3 people sitting in the same office and you start a teams call instead of just saying lets grab a meeting room and chat about this? You're cooked bro I would love to read your shitty book and see your measured outcome.

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