Microsoft Teams introduces office attendance tracking via Wi-Fi | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams introduces office attendance tracking via Wi-Fi

pcworld.com

46 pointsilreb9 comments

This is a useful feature for finding out if your coworkers are in the office if the environment is hybrid. Companies don't need this feature to go big brother on employees, they have badge logs and network logs for that already.

The issue, IME, isn’t corporate knowing, it’s managers across the board making big assumptions based on spontaneous observations.

Communication is the ultimate solution, but that solves location awareness as well. Unfortunately, once someone gets something in their head there’s a wall of prejudice before you get to communication, and appearances create unwanted dialog between managers.

So firefighting with another team looks like you’re faffing off by the cantina, and the hero-mode 15 hour WFH crunch that saved our bacon looks unfair and improper, and now it’s a discussion... It’s not just doing the job, but also making sure no one three departments over develops feelings about how that is presented internally.

There's a different between being "able to" get an information and "easily have" an information.

Logs still require someone to aggregate them, analyse them and present them in a form that's easily accessible and understadable by managers and also always up to date.

Teams will make all of this available without the company having to spend resources and manpower.

It's also illegal in the EU to use data for purposes other than that which it is collected for. A company can't retrospectively use network logs and badge logs to track office attendance unless they specifically collect it for this use.

It would be very challenging for companies to retroactively change this without it being successfully challenged in court (you can't really rely on consent after the employment relationship begins).

This is opt-in by the end-user and disabled by default, so represents a genuine opportunity for employees and employers to decide if they want to gather this information and if so, what the opt-in/out procedure looks like.

This enhancement seems like a decent improvement on an existing feature. Folks are up in arms about a privacy problem which may exist in the underlying, pre-existing feature (updating your presence in the office in Teams/Outlook). This just simplifies the process for the employee to comply with whatever their employer mandates.

Do you need to enable location on your phone for this?

I don't want my device on work wifi at all.

I barely allow their email to hit it.

The roadmap link only gives "Desktop" & "Mac" as the platforms at this point.

From the article:

> [Workplace Check-in] detects when a device connects to the company office’s Wi-Fi.

Sounds like it does not require any on-device setting or software, other than connecting to the WiFi.

Delayed feature from 8 months ago;

Some previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698930

Dear MS Teams, fuck off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com