I saw probably the same photo as you! The article wasn't even about that, we just noticed it in the photo. I immediately went and taped over my camera.
They hand those out at conventions too (or you can buy them, I guess). It's basically just a small sticker that you can just stick over your shutterless camera and now it has a shutter.
Just last week we found a bug in our system in that if an user accepts a meet on pc while also having the phone app open, the meet is opened in both devices, - that alone could end very badly.
The goal with software like windows is to eventualy take away all control. If you can run unaproved software, you can't even join the teams call. Then you will see stuff like this.
Yet it slowly becomes reality with every passing year. It's bad enough that we've essentially lost pay-to-own in favour of subscription models for a lot of popular software.
On our corp network, the amount of GPOs I've had to mangle together just to make Win11 usable is insane. The users are still going to have a fit in October.
No usually you do not get an immediate notification, but you can indeed see it by constantly checking you small camera window in the corner of the meeting. But you have to stay focused.
Is this legit? Brave's AI summary claims that Teams indeed gives this option to the host. However, it points to a Teams documentation page that does not mention such feature.
It was an honest question. I have seen various other horrible features, like Glassdoor allowing paying employers to remove negative ratings, so I freaked out a bit in case Teams has hidden features as well.
I know this is shitpost, but since there was another indication of such feature existing (although untrustworthy - the Brave Search's AI summary), I wanted to confirm.
Beyond the other answers stating that this isn't real:
Teams doesn't do one off charges for functionality like this. All functionality is managed by licensing, managed through your workplace's Azure tenant. Don't have the license, don't have the feature. Need the feature? Time to work with Microsoft billing to get you a new license (or additional one) and then your IT team to have the license applied to your account.
There aren't usually any upsells displayed to end users. In our environment we've only seen a rare "this functionality is not available on your license, go complain to your admin" type message, but usually it just doesn't display unavailable options.
On top of all that, Microsoft is dumb, but not this dumb. Last thing their team of lawyers would want is for them to be involved in some sort of "involuntary pornography" case or something.