Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

> The supposed benefit of being in the office is because teams work better in person. If everybody else is at the office, it’s obvious who isn’t there.

We're talking about corporate America here. They say "RTO because teams work better in person" while they simultaneously contradict themselves requiring distributed teams. What really matters is the leader is tall, looks important in suit, and makes the number go up (with stock buybacks if necessary).

This is a paper trail for "just cause" to fire someone.

Also shortens the leash on corp debt slaves.

Edit: this is the "enterprise solution", whereas I agree you're right at the margins.

Well, obviously the managers won't be working from the office, they're perfectly capable of WFH. Really funny in a way, since their work output is way harder to measure.

My biggest pet peeve - Ctrl plus shift plus v pastes unformatted but right next to it is Ctrl plus shift plus c which starts a call in whatever chat you are in. Also there is no way within ms teams to remove this binding. Wat‽

Does it just go by SSID or is it looking at the public IP address? If it’s just SSID I can just add an SSID of the same name.

It reads the local wifi network you're connected to. What would a VPN make for difference?

I think it can and willl be used more statistically. Yes, from your background you will get a sense and form an opinion, but with this, you can generate a report that says with high accuracy where you have spent every hour. This will be more sharp ammunition in case the employer want to use it against you.

The charitable interpretation is that this feature is just so your coworkers can tell if you are in the office so they know if they should go find you or have a call.

> We can usually tell based on your background.

Not really. Decent tele-conference platforms can automatically replace your background. I have a corporate-provided background in google meet, for example.

> And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes.

Often badges are just for automatic doors, not really connected to any real information / data collection system. Not all companies are data-collecting monsters. The company I work for, as an example, has no badges at all (but has people at the reception).

> And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?

Agree on this.

But the sad truth is that not everybody has all the necessary degrees of freedom to do that.

I might (and I would). But then again, I'm 33, single, no spouse and no kids. I don't have those responsibilities and I can take the risks. People with kids for example would be (understandably) more cautious.

Reading more about technologies like this it seems to create a unique profile of your usual type and style of usage (clicking, scrolling, typing) which can then be compared against.

Not condoning cheating - the point about just finding another job is it might not be that easy for people depending on what they do, what industry it's in, the number of jobs accessible to them at any given time, or average for those skills.

People with the most in demand skills already are able to do that and companies still are confused why they can't find the skilled labor they desire.

MacBooks just provide their GPS location to Jamf thanks to FindMy. Sure, you could spoof that by keeping it in a Faraday cage and use a $10,000 signal generator to generate GPS signals.

But then you go to all that trouble and still have to VPN into the office from an IP outside of your office.

Yeah I’m here like “what are we even talking about? What company is doing this over just reading badge swipe data?”

I know smaller companies might not have badging systems that can provide such analytics (or badging systems at all), but the Amazon anecdote smells fishy to say the least.

Amazon now does this with badge swipe data, and because you must badge in and out of Amazon offices they also track and report on how many hours you’re in the office.

Managers couldn't get badge swipe access but they could get wifi data, so that's what they used to find out who was actually coming into work (people were swiping their badge and leaving, etc)

>Is there any reason you can't spoof literally all of that?

I think that’s what is being insinuated.

No. Short of having your workplace install a cryptographic appliance internally on their network, you can spoof anything.

A computer can't know anything except what the environment tells it, and since you control the environment you can tell it whatever you want.

> I feel like complaining about Teams

Brother, there is not enough alcohol in the world.for this conversation.

> Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work

Not yet. Whenever you feel “this doesn’t affect me” about anything, just pause and think “if my situation was different, would I feel differently about it?”. If the answer is yes, you should react the same way as if you’re affected by it.

I built a usb mouse jiggler. The off the shelves ones are probably detectable via their PID/VID.