Is Microsoft Teams really going to start tracking employee locations?

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Is Microsoft Teams really going to start tracking employee locations? This is an Engadget News special. Microsoft's new workplace check-in feature for Teams has officially rolled out, making it possible to automatically update an employee's work location using Wi-Fi or desk peripheral connections. It may be off by default, requiring admin enablement and employee consent, but voluntary opt-in isn't as free a choice as it sounds in the workplace. Microsoft Teams is used by 93 of the Fortune 100 companies, and its new workplace check-in tool is packaged as a feature that's supposed to make employees' life easier by automatically checking them in once they get to work and connect to the company Wi-Fi, a replacement for physical check-in peripherals. It's also supposed to reduce the need to manually update your status and enable co-workers to know they can coordinate in-person meanings with you. As much as Microsoft tries to push this update as a straightforward opt-in feature that can be so helpful for employees, there's an endless list of concerns regarding privacy, social surveillance and the weaponization of presence in an age when return-to-office policies are suffocating the workforce.
What is the Teams workplace check-in feature?
Workplace check-in is a Teams feature that was designed to reduce the incommensurable effort of manually updating your work status. Rather than logging into Teams each morning and typing in-office, or whatever else you choose to entertain your workmates with, the feature detects your location automatically once you start using the company's Wi-Fi network. According to Microsoft's official documentation, the feature is an extension of the platform's existing online presence signal, and Microsoft 365's working hours controls. The goal is to not only let coworkers see whether someone is available, but also where they're working from. Because if the IT team sets things up just right, your status won't just show you're in the office, but exactly what room or floor you're in. Once your laptop connects to conference room C, for example, the whole office will know you're there.
Privacy, Workplace Monitoring and Trust Issues Microsoft swears this is not a monitoring tool and told Fortune that protecting employee privacy is at the core of how we innovate and build. And that may be true, to a degree, because admins have no reporting dashboard, no historical location logs, and no way to query where someone has been. Employees can also manually override or clear their location at any time, and the feature doesn't function outside of working hours. Still, when you're the only one on the team who denies this feature out of privacy concerns, there's an imbalance. The voluntary aspect of adopting this feature on a personal level suddenly feels like pressure. An ExpressVPN survey found that 80% of employers engage in remote work surveillance. The American Psychological Association says 56% of workers who experience monitoring by their employer feel tense or stressed out at work. Ironically, even Microsoft's analysis of the effects of digital surveillance classifies tracking a person's physical location and body movements as one of the most invasive methods of electronic performance monitoring. Microsoft itself has mandated that employees living within 50 miles of a company office must work on site at least three days a week, rolling out a Wi-Fi based location feature on the same platform while enforcing a return to office policy may not necessarily be related, but it's hard to ignore the optics. So here we are. There's yet another location tracking feature threatening employee privacy built into an app used by over one million organizations across the world. The biggest question right now isn't whether Microsoft built the feature with bad intentions, it's whether companies deploying it will find ways to abuse it.
Thanks for listening to the show. Make sure to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Today's show featured journalism by Engadget contributor, Gabriella Vatu, and was produced by Spoken Layer. I'm Imran Shaikh, and we'll talk more tomorrow.
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