Look, we all knew it was coming, but now it’s official. Microsoft just handed middle managers the ultimate weapon. Their new update for Microsoft 365 allows companies to track exactly where you are, and the days of pretending to be at your desk are over.
While making this easier to access isn’t a positive, there are a ton of ways that this can, and already is, being done at companies that actually care about this shit.
Yeah you’re totally in the office, but your laptop just magically has an IP from the subnet for devices connected over VPN 🙄
Once again I must insist that people need to stop expecting any privacy on work devices. It is possible to find out anything on them, including location, it’s just a matter of how much effort your workplace is willing to expend on looking.
Edit: While I appreciate the article being short and to the point, a link to any documentation on this would have been nice. The claim is that it will display the SSID of the Wi-Fi AP you’re connected to. While being able to get that from your phone is a new bit of reach, it’s possible to gather that from work devices easily.
Any company going this far will almost certainly be requiring device management on whatever device you put your work email on. So if you have your email on your personal phone the likelihood that they can already track your location 24/7 using your phone’s gps is extremely high.
I’m more worried about them listening to my mic and recording my camera at this point.
just use vpn all the time, even when at your desk in the office
This will break a lot of applications.
This is literally how our corporate network is setup. You MUST be on vpn or you cant get to anything. Makes the access permissions super simple. Prior to this setup there were authorization settings that differed between on-prem/off, on vpn or off, which office you were in, etc. now they just deny all unless you vpn in and then it uses your vpn account to validate access there, in one place. Saved a lot of headaches.
That is certainly a direction. I hope you have robust redunacies on the concentrator.
The above is just modern network security. The model is called zero trust.
Google pionerred it in the 2000s I believe, but its very normal now. A commom deployment will have an always on vpn agent on each device, which will then use mesh vpn tech like wireguard to do peer to peer connections between the client and server. There is no need for a central vpn controller. At most their is a dns-ish directory service that runs to let each agent queiry to get public keys for the other agents. Access is gated with RBAC and ACLs.
Tailscale is well known name that provodes this model. Netbird is a FOSS example.
That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.
Can’t use a vpn it shows location is from unexpected location and gets my passport reset. Its really annoying.
Our VPN gateway is different if you are already on the internal network.
Thank God my company is so antiquated they don’t even know about half the tech that exists to spy on employees. Thankfully I’m also head of IT so imma keep them in the dark about that loll. Every time I upgrade the simplest things it’s like I’ve shit out actual magic. It’s great!
That’s why I send passive aggressive messages about my company on my work computer. Hopefully they see me laughing at their incompetence and obvious nepotism.
We’ll, uh, see how it works out.