this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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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 π
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 phoneβs gps is extremely high.
You don't know how Cisco is triangulating your laptop's position from APs in range, do ya? It's 2015 tech, and it's insane.
Being able to see where everyone's cell phone is in the middle of an open-air concert ... and whether and where it has been on the muni network since ... has been valuable for cops looking to question a potential witness.
But yeah, if you're reading this in the company loo, your IT people probably know, if they cared. They don't care.
Hell, knowing when the boss's phone lights up on the site wifi was great for ambushing him with a purc req first-thing. ..or so I hear.
TL;DR: they don't need to know which IP range you're on, as their layer-1 has already ratted you out.
my direct supervisor has showed me what information he has access to w.r.t. wireless client information, such as client position.
My first thought would be how that is even possible, but given the fact that we record the location of each AP install, this makes a lot more sense.
I'm more worried about them listening to my mic and recording my camera at this point.
That's why mine's pointed at my dick 24/7. Wouldn't want them to miss anything.
So you point their mic to yours! They definitely won't miss that piss!
Comment matches username!
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.
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.
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!