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Limitless Worker Surveillance
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoThis kind of thing is why I EXCLUSIVELY browse the Internet on my phone while at work (without using work wifi, of course). I also never use my work email for personal correspondence, ever. Granted, I work at a remarkably lax institution that cares more about getting the job done and less about managing our lives, but these are habits I picked up working in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even imagine the kinds of perpetual monitoring that some of my friends from college have to put up with. Nobody cares about how long I'm in the bathroom. They like the software I write. And then we all go home at 5.
- mrfusion 11y agoHow would they track you through wifi?
- x1798DE 11y agoYeah, I am always shocked when I see people logged in to services and stuff at work. I use my phone, never on work wifi, to check e-mail, and if something comes up that needs a real interface, I use my laptop (on work wifi, but with a VPN to my home router). Doing anything else seems like madness to me.
- cbhl 11y agoWhat happens if your employer sets up a stingray to intercept your cellular communications?
- jessaustin 11y agoHopefully they document the fact in discoverable fashion, so your lawsuit can have that extra "human rights violation" flavor.
- thieving_magpie 11y agoI use personal accounts at work. If texts to my wife are a problem, sure have at it. I'll start circulating my resume. Luckily I've never worked at an organization that wanted to own my life to that extent.
- Loughla 11y agoAlso, if my work is being measured by time spent on task instead of output, I'm working in the wrong place.
- nostrademons 11y agoEh, I figured everything I did on the corp network was visible to my employer, but I also didn't care for the most part. If I'm going to post on Hacker News or Reddit, it's on the public Internet, and so having corporate network monitoring catch it is the least of my worries. I just figured that the best defense against getting fired is delivering value to my employer; they didn't care if I take a HN break as long as my overall productivity stayed high. The same applies now that I'm self-employed, too. I did tend to use my phone for personal IMs & emails, but that was because we also used GMail for work, and I didn't want to bother with having an incognito window open all the time.
- lurkinggrue 11y agoI run a portable browser in an encryped drive, even then I turn the caching on it off to it at least doesn't leave as many traces. I'm in IT so I know what we monitor.
- nitrogen 11y agoIf you are part of a conglomerate you also have to consider the possibility that another IT group is snarfing your traffic for employee monitoring and IDS purposes. I've actually seen an overeager IDS I didn't even know existed shut down network access for legitimate services.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoI remember this from my welcome screen on an Amazon-blessed laptop: "There is no expectation of privacy while using this system".
- matheweis 11y agoI refuse to participate in the worker wellness program for this very reason. The $10/mo I'm giving up isn't nearly worth the data that I'm coughing up in exchange...
- r0m4n0 11y agoYea, having worked for a big health insurance company with many "wellness programs" it's a bit scary what you agree to when you do the biometric screenings. All of your vitals go into a database for them to analyze and calculate risk. We weren't quite smart enough to really utilize it and most of the drive to implement these programs were not nefarious. Our intentions were primarily around the fact that requiring people with certain BMIs to lose weight does reduce healthcare costs.
- matheweis 11y ago> ... most of the drive to implement these programs were not nefarious. Nice choice of words there; that would imply some of the drive was nefarious. In my case they wanted all the usual vitals (height, weight, blood pressure), along with a couple of blood draws... and if you started reading the little thing you signed along with it, it was unreal what you were signing away. I had co-workers getting calls from the insurance companies nurse practitioners wanting to discuss their vitals. You're basically talking a turnkey Gattaca scenario. If the intention is truly just to make people aware of potential health risks, partner with GPs and have them do the conversation. I'd be much more comfortable with a "firewalled" abstraction layer between me and the insurance company that doesn't allow for any data sharing.
- superuser2 11y agoInsurance companies are strongly incentivized to make the catastrophes they insure against less likely to happen. Car insurance companies are the force for safety engineering in the automotive industry. Property insurance companies audit safes and alarm systems and require that policyholders use good ones. The FDIC is pretty strict about the behavior of its covered banks. Hell, go look at your household appliances and light fixtures - UL is Underwriter's Laboratories. It makes perfect sense that health insurance companies become the force for healthy lifestyles. This topic came up for debate recently and the American people chose to stay the course of addressing healthcare through for-profit insurance companies. Why should those companies not act in their self-interest to reduce risk?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- manishsharan 11y agoMy employer MITMs my https sessions. The result is that I can not use Firefox to google stuff or use any site that uses HTTP Strict Transport Security . And since we are still on Windows 7, we end up using IE which is a pain in the ass.
- Spooky23 11y agoJust add your employer's public key to the Firefox trust store. If you explicitly trust the signer, it shouldn't block you.
- nkristoffersen 11y agoIt's a MITM attack so I'm guessing the traffic is no longer secure.
- Spooky23 11y agoIt is, but he's using IE so that isn't an issue. Firefox provides it's own TLS root certificate store, while Chrome and IE inherit the system's.
- leereeves 11y agoIt may be secure against outsiders (depending on what the MITM does with it) but is almost certainly being monitored by the employer.
- NickNameNick 11y agoSome of those 'security' platforms are pretty terrible. I can't remember which vendor it was, but at least one of them was accepting invalid certificates, and re-encrypting the traffic with its own certificate chain. Completely hiding any errors that should have been visible to the end users.
- 11y ago
- PixelB 11y agoThe company I used to work for required that you give them backdoor access to your cell phone if you wanted to check your work email from it. This gave them the ability to factory reset your phone remotely, as well as change your pin/unlock, along with who knows what else. I refused and was terminated.
- jonathankoren 11y agoI've seen that same phone policy before. I simply never paired my phone with the secure wlan, and it was fine. No email, but whatev'. I wanted Twitter.
- rfrey 11y agoYou lost your job over the ability to check work email from a personal device?
- PixelB 11y agoI lost my job because of "noncompliance" to their demands that they have complete access to my personal phone.
- jessaustin 11y agoWe're confused because above it seemed as if your other choice would have been just not checking your work email with your personal phone. That doesn't seem as if it would have been a hardship.
- PixelB 11y agoManagement required that you send a group email if you were going to arrive late to work. So when I'm stuck in traffic because of an accident how do I email them? Before you ask, they said no text messages were not acceptable.. their requirements were if you had any issues that you had to send an email.
- 11y ago
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI work at a school whose Wi-Fi requires you to install some suspicious software, I mask my browsers user-agent to pretend I'm on a platform that software does not run on, stops them from nagging me. Now I am on a platform they can't support anyway (Linux).
- arrty88 11y agoI use a VPN on my phone while on work wifi. Openvpn is free for ios and Android and a digital ocean server costs 5 bucks