Microsoft Teams: Separation of telephony cancelled, removal of EXIF data

The planned separation of telephony to accelerate Teams is not happening. Teams removes EXIF data from shared images.

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Jan 16, 2026 at 8:22 am CET

2 min. read

By

Dirk Knop

Microsoft is not proceeding with a planned change to Teams that would have meant work for admins from the IT security team. Instead, Microsoft is strengthening privacy protection, as Teams will in the future remove EXIF data, such as geolocation data and camera information, from shared images.

Regarding the improvement of Teams performance and startup times, Microsoft planned to introduce a new process, ms-teams_modulehost.exe. For this, IT admins would have had to add approvals in their organizations, for example, in the form of whitelist entries. Microsoft has now updated the corresponding entry MC1189656 (copy at merill.net) in the MS365 admin center. “The planned renaming of the Teams 'Calling and Meetings' file has been cancelled due to a Windows fix in versions 24H2 and 25H2,” Microsoft writes there. “No admin actions are needed anymore.”

The change did not introduce a new binary file after all. Originally, a Windows compatibility issue required renaming an existing executable file as a workaround. Now, the Microsoft Teams team and the Windows team have joined forces to deliver a fix for this Windows compatibility problem. As this fix has been fully distributed, a renaming of the executable file is no longer necessary.

Teams: More privacy

Microsoft also plans to better protect the privacy of Teams users, which the company announced in the MS365 admin center in post MC1217997 (copy). According to the Microsoft365 roadmap, the rollout of the feature is scheduled to begin in February 2026, with the admin center providing more precise timeframes for individual channels. Teams will then delete the hidden EXIF data from images shared by participants in chats and channels. These may contain information about the location of the shot and the camera used, for example.

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However, the function does not change the visible image information, the developers assure. The function will be rolled out to Teams for Windows desktop, Teams for Mac desktop, and Teams for Web.