Microsoft has recently been rolling out multiple updates for its team collaboration app, Teams, but it appears the company is slowing down the development of one feature, likely because it is somewhat controversial.
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As Forbes magazine noted, Microsoft updated the public roadmap for Microsoft 365 to postpone the release of a feature that would have allowed employers to know the location of their employees.
This feature would have enabled Teams to detect the Wi-Fi network an employee is connected to and then update their work location accordingly, according to Forbes.
For example, if an employee is connected to the company network "Building123_WiFi," their work location in Teams and Outlook would show as "Building 123."
The downside is that if an employee is late, works from home, or uses any Teams or Outlook apps on a network outside their organization, the employer would be aware of it.
Clearly, this did not sit well with employees working in hybrid arrangements or those unwilling to accept this level of privacy intrusion.
While Microsoft seems to be trying to find a balance by disabling this location-tracking feature by default, requiring IT admins to enable it, and then allowing end users to opt in, this does not provide a true solution. The process collapses entirely if the organization enforces location tracking as a mandatory policy, leaving employees without any means to object.
Although the Teams location-tracking feature was originally scheduled to roll out on Windows and Mac in January, it was postponed to February and then delayed again to March.
It is not entirely clear why Microsoft continues to delay this feature, but it may be related to striking a delicate balance between giving employees more flexibility and giving employers more control over the use and availability of company resources.
