Microsoft Teams: The controversial WLAN location tracking starts

After massive criticism of planned location tracking in Teams, Microsoft is making a new attempt. A revised version of the function should still show whether employees are in the office. However, it promises more control and data protection.

New approach to location tracking

Microsoft is currently working hard on Teams. The design should be partially revised, meeting notes made more accessible and the app made faster. Now there is another new function on the agenda, which, however, had caused controversy in the past. After initial plans for automatic location sharing met with massive resistance, the group is now integrating a revised version of the so-called check-in function into Teams. As soon as employees connect to the company network, the system updates the status and shows that the employee is in the office.

The new feature is a kind of digital time clock. When employees enter the building and the notebook connects to the WLAN, colleagues and superiors see this immediately. Anyone who works from another location, such as their home office, automatically receives “Remote” status.

Revision for more data protection

Like Microsoft in its Blog post about the check-in feature As explained, the new development focuses more on data protection than before. The company is responding directly to previous concerns raised by data protection advocates and users. Administrators will be able to activate the function for the entire company in the future, but the final activation rests entirely with the respective end users.

To protect privacy, the software developers also integrated several security mechanisms into the platform to prevent unauthorized monitoring by superiors. Users can manually hide their location at any time. The system also does not save any historical movement profiles and the tracking only works in previously configured company networks.

Data protection versus transparency

However, critics continue to complain that supervisors can indirectly control the exact arrival times of their employees. Additionally, if someone manually hides the location, it could be viewed negatively in tightly managed organizations. In addition, there is a risk that employers will issue new internal guidelines that require the use of location sharing for all employees. IT managers are now required to inform the workforce about the upcoming changes at an early stage. The update should according to the official Microsoft roadmap will be rolled out to all users starting this month. Administrators must enter the network data in advance so that the application recognizes the locations without errors. Despite all the adjustments, the check-in function still has a certain potential for conflict in companies.