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.
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.
Any company going this far will almost certainly be requiring device management on whatever device you put your work email on. So if you have your email on your personal phone the likelihood that they can already track your location 24/7 using your phone’s gps is extremely high.
I’m more worried about them listening to my mic and recording my camera at this point.
You don’t know how Cisco is triangulating your laptop’s position from APs in range, do ya? It’s 2015 tech, and it’s insane.
Being able to see where everyone’s cell phone is in the middle of an open-air concert … and whether and where it has been on the muni network since … has been valuable for cops looking to question a potential witness.
But yeah, if you’re reading this in the company loo, your IT people probably know, if they cared. They don’t care.
Hell, knowing when the boss’s phone lights up on the site wifi was great for ambushing him with a purc req first-thing. …or so I hear.
TL;DR: they don’t need to know which IP range you’re on, as their layer-1 has already ratted you out.
just use vpn all the time, even when at your desk in the office
Our VPN gateway is different if you are already on the internal network.
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.
This is literally how our corporate network is setup. You MUST be on vpn or you cant get to anything. Makes the access permissions super simple. Prior to this setup there were authorization settings that differed between on-prem/off, on vpn or off, which office you were in, etc. now they just deny all unless you vpn in and then it uses your vpn account to validate access there, in one place. Saved a lot of headaches.
That is certainly a direction. I hope you have robust redunacies on the concentrator.
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 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.
But when MS pulls this invasive bullshit it makes people afraid that my 911 software is doing the same thing.
How’s that?
That sounds like such a drain.
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).
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.
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
Narkoslop
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.
I don’t think it’s wise to believe tech oligarchs saying that orwellian surveillance tech cannot be exploited for orwellian surveillance.
Besides companies can just require employees to opt in - “we just built this fresh horror, how companies use it is up to them” doesn’t really fly.
That’s why you leave your work laptop at work and tunnel in from home!
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.
My work/manager has the best possible way of managing: get your work done, dont make drama, work as little or much as you need. We have to try to get 45 hours but almost no one does or they pad their timesheet. But then there’s weeks you travel and work 60 hours (but its actually work not wasting time)
Works great for people like me who are useless from 1 pm to about 3 pm, but really able to get a lot of work done from 5 to 7 ish. Unless youre missing meetings, no one cares where you are. I could go to Hawaii tomorrow with my laptop and do the exact same work I do now.
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
I’ve been in software development for 15 years and never had a manager that wasn’t at least a little bit of a micromanager. The reality is that it rarely takes 8 hours or more to do the things that need to be done in a day but the expectation most often is still that if my AuDHD ass isn’t in my often windowless office for 9 hours a day then I must not be working.
good managers don’t care.
Except your managers might think it’s important, or you’re a shitty manager trying to fill their time and look important by micromanaging your employees.
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.
So is it just teams? I’m confused
Great job MS. This is illegal here.
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?
Looks like a broken link.
I edited it, thank you for alerting me.
I’ll either deny permission or straight up fucking uninstall it.
