Teams = Corporate Spyware

Well I’ve always known that Teams isn’t a good software for corporations as a quick text chat and voice chat service but today I realized that it’s 100% a spyware software that is for some reason allowed in EU and in Estonia.

For me it’s mind boggling that a software has features which can be equalized as a camera device in your office room. Like honestly, I was confronted today that people don’t know if I’m at work or away because my Teams status is always shown as offline and sometimes I don’t respond quickly enough… that’s because I’m either doing my work or it’s almost the end of the work day and it isn’t something serious. But colleagues instantly will write to my boss if I’m being at work or not, like YIKES. Maybe write me 2 times, or call, or write email, give me a little time BEFORE you’re gonna bother my boss?

After all of this I turned on the status to be available and I’ve also always knows that the status is going very fast to the away status if you’re not moving your cursor but today I experienced it myself and I can tell you that even if my status is online and it goes to away status then people are gonna be like “is he even working” and so on. So this is literally a spyware to constantly spy if you’re doing something at the jobs computer.

Yes there are scripts and stuff that you can use to make your cursor jiggle so you can always be online and devices to buy but in my case I cannot run scripts because it will be logged into central logs and I will not buy a random device that needs to be plugged somewhere for ex. your PC/laptop.

The point of my long yap is that Teams == Spyware and if possible just try to spread the word and move companies away from such products. Use Rocket.Chat or something like that instead.

I will leave some cursor jiggling scripts that I’ve found on the GitHub and blogs but remember if you have IT security department then most likely they will log everything you run from your computer and contact you if it’s a random script running for a long time.

Both are PowerShell scripts.

Scroll lock on and off every 240 seconds:

$s=New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell;while($true){$s.SendKeys('{SCROLLLOCK}');Start-Sleep -Seconds 240}

Cursor mover:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms

while ($true)
{
  $Pos = [System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position
  $x = ($pos.X % 500) + 1
  $y = ($pos.Y % 500) + 1
  [System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position = New-Object System.Drawing.Point($x, $y)
  Start-Sleep -Seconds 10
}