Technology

Only one team working to make Teams worse???

I swear people do not understand the point of what microsoft does.

There isn't a team tasked with making teams worse. They're tasked with extracting all possible value out of their product. Part of that value is infromation like where you are, what you're doing, what you're talking about, what you search for, what you actually do for your job, who is around you, what they talk about, where they are, what they are doing, what they search for, and what they do for their job and how everyone spends their money.

All of this is incredibly valuable data to governments, businesses and private individuals that want to advertise, suppress dissenting political voices, enhance useful dissenting political voices, and otherwise manipulate global influence.

They just don't want you to think about declining any permissions, triggering regulatory action, or switching to another platform.

This is what I gathered on the subject, feel free to correct if anything is wrong:

The WiFi tracking works by scanning for nearby WiFi networks, identifying which routers are nearby and their signal strengths, matching those against their database of known WiFi access points, and using that data to estimate your location. 

For now the feature will be off by default, first has to be enabled by your company, and then the user has to opt in for it to be used.

For those who are required to use Microsoft products, it can by bypassed by using a wired Ethernet connection and not using Teams on any devices using a wireless connection.

Edit: As @lividweasel@lemmy.world pointed out, Microsoft is not using WiFi positioning systems to determine location, but rather updating your location to “in the office” or not depending on whether your device is connected to one of the organization’s WiFi SSIDs.

"Tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."

If you require someone to opt-in, they're no longer "opting in"

So glad I only use Teams in a browser, fuck this bullshit.

Don't install Teams.

God damn it, at work they pay us to put that stuff on our personal phones... maybe I've been a bit too lenient on that, maybe I should get a work phone.

This is illegal in Norway :)

They've crossed the line a long long time ago. All microslop products are straight up unusable.

Microsoft: Our product is not our software. It's you!

I worked on a large(ish) contract (tens of millions) with one of Microsoft’s engineering teams where they were implementing an Azure managed version of software we produced. I would regularly refuse to install teams at the meetings, using teams in-browser only.

It also ensured that the technical project manager had to be the one to transcribe anything in our notes into whatever tools Microsoft was using.

While it was never said, the Microsoft engineers seemed to completely understand and never pushed back against my refusal to a) install crapware and b) not take on work that wasn’t mine.

Not using teams: win win.

I wonder if the team that is tasked with making teams worse has team meetings with the whole team on teams.

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to "dual boot" to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can't even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don't write many office-format documents though, so I'm more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there's that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft's stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I'm not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

The users aren't the customers. The customers are the users' bosses.

Having Teams remind you that, during session recordings, your video and what you say can be used by Microsoft for whatever purpose they want, including (but not limited to) training AI.

This wasn't the line that was crossed? Seeing/hearing your likeness in the next generated AI / copilot commercial, because you needed to consent in order to work. This is "fine" /s

... but having Microsoft know that you're answering Teams messages while on the toilet... yeah, that's where "the line gets crossed" (eyeroll)

We need to wake-up and drop this technological cancer.

edit: a word

Employees arent the ones paying for Teams, so why would they care? Teams could openly market itself as remote work surveillance tool for employers and they'd gobble that shit up.

Teams can be worse?

Honestly, I would screen potential employers by whether they are a Microsoft shop or not. Fuck ‘em.

They are called stakeholders.

Of course there is, this guy leads it

There have been teams at Microsoft making everything worse since 1998. Why is this news?

This feel like 1 office shooting away from a huge settlement....

And is why we don't use Microsoft products.

I was gonna use teams for a few groups of people, but fuck this noise. What are the best alternatives? Something like slack or discord but those have their issues too

Probably the same pick me they put in charge of Xbox.

So many other apps do this already, including the OS. This is changing your Teams status for you, so coworkers can see if you’re in the office or not.

If your hybrid wfh office has any sort of reservation system then this is likely already happening.

Microslop