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The last time I had a "work-laptop", I was fired (for boring reasons) suddenly and without prior notice, and had to immediately hand my laptop over. I wasn't ev

The last time I had a "work-laptop", I was fired (for boring reasons) suddenly and without prior notice, and had to immediately hand my laptop over. I wasn't even allowed to go back to my desk and gather my things, because the HR manager at that time was so paranoid. I'm pretty confident I didn't have anything personal on there, but just to be certain I wasn't leaking passwords, I did a quick rm -rf ~ &; disown Point being: employers have all the leverage over their hardware, and you never know how or when they will use it. Encryption is your friend.

llampx 6y ago
You had time to enter that command (with or without sudo) before they took your machine back? That said, I've heard of cases where an ex-employee was sued by their employer for deleting the drive, for example salespeople who maintain contact lists.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  So I was told I was at a 1-on-1 meeting with my boss, and that the HR person needed to be part of that meeting. I brought the laptop in expecting to take notes or whatever. I essentially got lucky, but they were a bit concerned when they saw me hastily typing, even though they had already revoked all of my credentials.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Isn't the takeaway "never store or do anything on company hardware that you want to keep to yourself"? I wouldn't trust personal material to a company laptop even if it was encrypted.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  Yes, but my main concern was the data from my password manager, which existed elsewhere. I don't remember for certain, but I may have set my password store to be permanently open, which leaves a copy of the encryption key in the user directory. Really, the practice should already be, "if you have data you care about, then always have offsite backups".
oceanghost 6y ago
I did something like this once. There was this critical bug in a system I had designed. It was no big deal, 2 days to fix. Privately, the management had forbade me from fixing the bug. Literally forbade me, and assigned me lots of support work (that didn't have tickets-- it would look like I wasn't working). Then a month later the project manager makes a show of coming over to yell at me in front of everyone for this bug not being fixed. I zero'd my personal data, walked out of the building and never went back.

llampx 6y ago

You had time to enter that command (with or without sudo) before they took your machine back? That said, I've heard of cases where an ex-employee was sued by their employer for deleting the drive, for example salespeople who maintain contact lists.

thomastjeffery 6y ago
So I was told I was at a 1-on-1 meeting with my boss, and that the HR person needed to be part of that meeting. I brought the laptop in expecting to take notes or whatever. I essentially got lucky, but they were a bit concerned when they saw me hastily typing, even though they had already revoked all of my credentials.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

Isn't the takeaway "never store or do anything on company hardware that you want to keep to yourself"? I wouldn't trust personal material to a company laptop even if it was encrypted.

thomastjeffery 6y ago
Yes, but my main concern was the data from my password manager, which existed elsewhere. I don't remember for certain, but I may have set my password store to be permanently open, which leaves a copy of the encryption key in the user directory. Really, the practice should already be, "if you have data you care about, then always have offsite backups".

oceanghost 6y ago

I did something like this once. There was this critical bug in a system I had designed. It was no big deal, 2 days to fix. Privately, the management had forbade me from fixing the bug. Literally forbade me, and assigned me lots of support work (that didn't have tickets-- it would look like I wasn't working). Then a month later the project manager makes a show of coming over to yell at me in front of everyone for this bug not being fixed. I zero'd my personal data, walked out of the building and never went back.