For some, it’s annoying to have to constantly ask “Where are you?” Friend groups share each others’ locations; guardians having mommy-tracking apps that can pinpoint their children’s whereabouts, and now employers will be able to track where specifically in the building you are with the new Microsoft Teams update.
The feature, aptly called “Automatic Update of Work Location,” will automatically update your work location based on your Wi-Fi connection. Go to the north side of campus? Your laptop will hop on the Wi-Fi there and pinpoint precisely your position. Plug your laptop into desk peripherals (plugging a laptop into a configured docking) will place your exact current spot within the office.
In other words, no need to ask “wya” anymore.
For Microsoft, the feature is meant to promote collaboration. “This feature is opt-in and intended to help employees coordinate in-person work more smoothly with their teams,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Fortune. And now as more companies begin requiring increased in-office presence, it may be a way to ensure people are following Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates. But surveillance experts are asking, what was wrong with a simple message asking of one’s vicinity to another?
“This is a solution in search of a problem when we already have existing solutions,” University of Maryland professor Jessica Vitak told Fortune. “Do these companies ever put these ideas through a creepy assessment? Like, if you tell this to your partner or to a friend, are they going to be like, ‘That’s kind of creepy’?”
Microsoft, however, maintains the new update will allow employees to more seamlessly work together. “It is not a monitoring tool and we do not support employee surveillance in any way,” the spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “Protecting employee privacy is at the core of how we innovate and build.”
First it was RTO. Now it’s assigned seating
When a user connects their device to their organization’s Wi-Fi network, Teams will automatically detect and broadcast their work location to colleagues. Depending on how a company’s wireless infrastructure is set up, the feature can determine a specific building or even a specific room. (Originally slated for a December 2025 rollout, but the launch has been pushed back repeatedly until April 2026.) If the network isn’t configured to that level of granularity, it will at minimum indicate whether someone is in the office or working remotely.
Microsoft isn’t the only company in this space that’s given rise to a whole new segment of employer-mandated technology, dubbed as “bossware” by those in the online privacy space. And the Teams feature is just one of the many bossware elements that comes as companies continue to increase their return-to-office mandates. A recent MIT study found four out of five companies are tracking remote or hybrid workers in some manner. The global research firm Gartner also found that 71% of employees are digitally monitored (up from 30% from just last year), a number all the more troubling when you factor in half of all employees have trust in their employer. A New York Times investigation even found that eight of the top 10 largest employers in the country also track productivity, often in real time.
Some companies like Cisco are going beyond the Teams’ Wi-Fi location tracking update. Cisco’s Spaces platform, used by more than 8,800 businesses worldwide including WeWork and InterContinental Hotels, has digitized 11 billion square feet of enterprise space—think security cameras and video conferencing hardware—to create 24.7 trillion location data points to map occupancy, according to Wired. Logitech has also used radar sensors to let employers know which rooms are being used. According to legal scholar Ifeoma Ajunwa, this is just a result of tech companies responding to employer demands. “The increased surveillance of workers is contributing to an increased demand for the AI technologies, also known as bossware, that is used for the surveillance.”
Some researchers are sounding the alarm bells when it comes down to how close this new update can track down one’s location.
Vitak, whose research focuses on privacy and surveillance in the workplace, questioned whether the feature solves a problem that actually exists: “Do we really need that mechanism on top of Teams itself, in which I just send you a DM and say, ‘Hey, you around? You want to meet?'”
She flagged a specific concern about how location visibility affects different workers unequally: “We have lots of research showing women, in particular…. often feel more uncomfortable with technology in the workplace—whether it’s facial recognition or something that is promoting making more visible your location at any given time.”
Information scientist Michael Zimmer drew a clear line between acceptable and invasive tracking: “Do employers have a right or expectation to know where their employees are? Yes, I suppose so, in most circumstances, in many environments,” Zimmer said, offering an example of a delivery person using a company truck that is being monitored by GPS and likely has cameras on it.
“But if I’m just a random person working in a campus environment or an office building, it seems like any more localized location tracking beyond ‘I’m in the building or not’—you do run the risk of it becoming invasive.” He also mirrored Vitak’s questioning, asking whether there really is a problem to solve with the new rollout, adding the update has “features that the engineers probably think is a great idea, but the social scientists would say we need to think a little bit harder about this.”
The illusion of opt-in
Microsoft has emphasized that the feature is off by default and that administrators cannot consent on workers’ behalf: an employee must personally opt in. But privacy experts argue that “voluntary” is a deeply complicated word in a workplace setting, where power dynamics can render any choice effectively coerced.
“If I’m the only person on my team that doesn’t have it turned on, I’m sure that’s going to create some kind of social effect as to why I’m not being a team player,” Zimmer told Fortune. He also raised a question about who exactly the data is visible to: “It might be reasonable to say your boss can know where you are, but I don’t know if my colleagues really need to.”
Vitak echoed the team pressure concern: “You might have team norms, so in your work group there’s an expectation that when you’re on campus, you’re doing this.” She urged companies to “focus on not just what’s legal, but people’s expectations and level of comfort. People already feel like technology is incredibly invasive. Let’s not extend that further into the workplace.” She also raised an unresolved technical question — even if an employee opts out, it remains unclear whether administrators can still access location data on the backend regardless of what the individual chooses.
Ajunwa, author of The Quantified Worker, a book about how new software is changing the workplace, also made a case against the voluntary framing. While there is no federal law prohibiting employers from tracking employee locations (some industry regulations may actually require it), the issue is the sentiment surrounding what truly is meant by voluntary. “Most workers do not feel they can opt out of these practices and still keep their job,” she told Fortune. “When accepting surveillance on the job is part of accepting the job, it belies any notion that these practices are voluntary for workers.“
The timing of this rollout is hard to ignore. Microsoft recently mandated that employees living within 50 miles of a company office (at first within the Puget Sound area, then nationally) must work onsite at least three days per week by the end of last month. Enforcing a RTO mandate just as the company rollouts Wi-Fi tracking features on one of the most widely-used work software (91% of the Fortune 100 uses Teams) is something experts warn won’t sit well to employees. “I just don’t feel the risks to privacy or even just like my dignity and autonomy, even as an employee, that there’s really much to gain,” Zimmer said.
