I've worked in many large Corporates, mainly in the financial sector. I've also spent a large part of my early career designing and deploying the 'standard' bu

I've worked in many large Corporates, mainly in the financial sector. I've also spent a large part of my early career designing and deploying the 'standard' build that gets put on all work end-user machines. At the very least, a regular full audit of your machine will be done. It will be looking for unauthorised executables, scripts, and certain filenames. This is in addition to the normal malware/virus scanning with central reporting that will also be enabled. Then there's the prevention of the user being elevated, so that normal users can't install anything (although stuff like Chrome, and some Chat apps try to bypass this) - some places totally rely on a central deployment platform (i.e. SCCM) other places allow exception via one-time codes. It's this prevention that tends to fubar most dev tools, which assume the user has a high level of rights. Web usage is definitely logged, with either auto alerts to line managers/HR based on keywords, or is only actively looked at if it's a problem employee. Most countries have employment laws, which mean that web usage HAS to be logged - it's to protect the employee as much as the employer. Unscrupulous employers also install 'idle' monitors, to check that the user is actively working on the machine during the day (I'm looking at you, Barclays Bank!) - these are people no self respecting professional should ever work for in my opinion. In short, if you think you are trying to do something on your work machine that you do not want you employer to know about, then it's probably something you should be doing on your personal device instead.