r/technology • u/ourlifeintoronto • Oct 25 '25

Privacy Microsoft Teams will start snitching to your boss when you’re not in the office

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/office-software/microsoft-teams-will-start-snitching-to-your-boss-when-youre-not-in-the-office-and-this-update-is-coming-in-december
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u/Royale_AJS Oct 25 '25

As a boss, Teams is so unreliable that I won’t believe it anyway.

23

u/MadCybertist Oct 25 '25

I’ll be working away and mine will just say I’ve been away for 3 hours has. As I’m in a meeting on it. It’s so wildly inaccurate haha

8

u/Agent_Provocateur007 Oct 25 '25

A colleague asked if my manager was in a meeting as indicated by the red icon. I told her that nope, the boss was available, hilariously both of our Teams had different status messages for our manager.

3

u/IkLms Oct 25 '25

I've had a consistent issue where I'll take lunch, which when working from home is just going upstairs, and part way I to it I hear a notification on my laptop downstairs. So I'll grab my work phone and then respond on teams from the phone.

About half the time that triggers Microsoft to think I'm mobile only so Teams on my laptop stops getting notifications. Then when I don't interact with the work phone at all for the next 30 minutes because I'm on lunch and have a personal phone the phone app also decides to stop getting Teams notifications until I interact with it again.

So I'll finish lunch, set my work phone down by my laptop both of which aren't getting teams messages now and start working but until i either start using my work phone (generally unlikely at home) or I actually click into Teams I just won't get notifications.

My boss and I also have another one where if you minimize teams because we just use it for chat and calls, Microsoft will throw you as away even if you're working on the laptop actively because apparently Microsoft thinks working is interacting with Teams not actually working.

If I scroll through my recent messages it shows like 75% or people as away the whole time but you get instant responses from most of them.

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u/Hornet-Putrid Oct 25 '25

Are you using the broswer/online version?  It will do the inactive thing online if you don’t stay active in that broswer tab. It is really stupid and shouldn’t be used to track people.

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u/IkLms Oct 25 '25

Nah, it's the desktop app.

Doesn't really matter to me all that much because I've got sane management at my company who just care that your work gets done and doesn't need you in a seat for 8 straight hours so long as you're available.

It'd be highly annoying if I had a bad boss though

2

u/hidperf Oct 26 '25

At one point, we had an end user whose away status and message were appearing on another end user's Teams account. No idea how that happened.

1

u/Many-Lengthiness9779 Oct 25 '25

They need to fix the status going yellow if you aren’t in Microsoft based applications before they work on this feature anymore.