The current version is just in office and home, this announcement extends it to allow for specific on-site spaces/buildings which for large campuses is advantageous. I haven’t seen anything that says it will directly track and report your location Outside of the generic ones that an admin configures like the “Studio B” example in the article. It uses pretty benign signals to boot: a corporate WiFi connection, a specific peripheral like a monitor, or wake from sleep (which Teams already does for normal presence and presumably to note the absence of other location signals). Microsoft says it won’t track specific desks, offices, or floors but I’m guessing if an admin wanted to put the effort in that could be setup within the limits of how many locations are available to configure.

Again though the issue isn’t this feature, it’s that those are shitty managers and the solution is to deal with that, not complain about how a feature could be misused. Most features of most tools could be used in malicious ways but we keep them because they also provide value. Crappy managers have a thousand ways to try and track “productivity” and use those tools against you. Email counts, calendar availability, pull request metrics, etc.