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Comment by repeekad

5 hours ago

This feels like a much better feature than “they can track your realtime location from the mobile app” as implied in the article? Plus employees will have to opt in?

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

> Plus employees will have to opt in?

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.

They can already do… pretty much any organization uses a VPN or “ZTNA” to provide access to resources so they know where you are.

> Plus employees will have to opt in?

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."

  • My concern is if the employee is aware, at least let me quit before I’m silently opted into my boss realizing I can get the same work done with less time at the desk from home