The tracking is still gross, but limited to opt-in on office WiFi seems a lot less dramatic of a headline, especially given the main concern people have is work from home
If a company policy says you have to opt in, not opting in means you're breaching the policy and might get fired. Entirely legal in at-will employment places, but potentially not in places with better worker protections.
Saying that, I just got announcement from my employer they will not be turning it on for now.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/27/france-to-ditch-us-...
That's not a bad thing.
But I think its totally unrealistic and impractical to deal with this kind of thing by being so choosy that you won't work for an org that uses Microsoft. Actually acting that way probably just means choosing to be unemployed (for the vast majority, at least).
I mean, that's not really how "opt-in" works for features that your company owns; you might have to "opt-in" technically but your company will probably make that a little more mandatory.
I do agree that the blog post, headline, and HN comments are as usual quite an overreaction, but this feature is pretty gross. It's also weird because the controversy/grossness-to-utility ratio seems awful, which either means that Microsoft product management has gotten as bad as everyone thinks it has or there's some future plan to make it more "robust."