Microsoft Groups will quickly snitch in your location to your group

For higher or worse, Microsoft Groups is among the most essential communication apps within the skilled world. It’s utilized by thousands and thousands for chat messages, video conferences, and sending recordsdata. Now, based on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, Groups is getting a brand new characteristic in March 2026 that few individuals are going to love—and it’s unhealthy sufficient that it’ll possible increase considerations amongst knowledge privateness advocates.

The brand new characteristic is described as follows:

“When customers hook up with their group’s Wi-Fi, Groups will quickly have the ability to robotically replace their work location to mirror the constructing they’re working from. This characteristic shall be off by default. Tenant admins will determine whether or not to allow it and require end-users to opt-in.”

Although which may sound fairly tame on paper, there are some unsettling implications that might come up from this characteristic. In brief, everybody within the Groups group will at all times know the place their colleagues are in real-time as they transfer round from Wi-Fi entry level to entry level. This can make it simpler to drop in on a colleague unannounced or shortly prepare a bodily assembly. Furthermore, it additionally means you gained’t have the ability to retreat to a far nook of the workplace in hopes of remaining undetected so you’ll be able to work in peace and quiet.

Above all, nonetheless, this new computerized location-setting characteristic could possibly be utilized by employers to watch their workers. Is Worker A adhering to hybrid work tips like “two days at residence and three days within the workplace”? Is Worker B at all times working from residence and skipping out on in-office days? Taken to the intense, it might even be used to notice when Worker C arrives on web site to find out tardiness.

For corporations pushing return-to-office on their workers, this new Groups characteristic would possibly even be used for coverage enforcement.

The characteristic is at the moment marked as “in improvement” with a worldwide rollout deliberate for March 2026 throughout Home windows and macOS methods. In keeping with the unique plan, Microsoft needed to launch this characteristic as early as December 2025, which was then postponed to February 2026, and now once more by one other month.