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Three. My employer's laptop, my current client's laptop (I'm in a consulting branch of a large corporation), and my personal laptop. Pre-Covid I lugged them on

Three. My employer's laptop, my current client's laptop (I'm in a consulting branch of a large corporation), and my personal laptop. Pre-Covid I lugged them on airplanes every week. I enjoy HN for many reasons, one of which is to encounter approaches and perspectives that I would not ever even remotely consider. I would not use my employer's laptop for personal, let alone a side-gig purpose, with a 10 foot pole. It's not mine, I have no control of it, I have no visibility into what is being monitored nor how it is used, where the data goes, what I should install on it, etc. Employer has full legal right to request it back this evening, do whatever forensic examinations they want, and have interesting questions or claims on anything they find. Yes laptop is a tool, but it's such a complex multipurpose massively powerful dangerous tool, that even if we try to make a claim "Pen and Laptop are legally the same as a employer-provided-tool", I find the surface area of a Pen minuscule compared to the surface area of a laptop and everything I can do with it / put on it.

wepple 4y ago
Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.
- tjoff 4y ago
  And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it. That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Not to negate your point, but a related pondering : I would assume that the Venn diagram of companies that make claim on property created on their laptops ; vs companies that let you install fresh OS and software from image and repository of your choice and access work network / store proprietary data ; is practically zero. (If you did not install fresh OS from image of your choice, then you did not install software from scratch and should not be confident what's in your work laptop and what it's doing / monitoring)

wepple 4y ago

Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.

tjoff 4y ago
And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it. That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Not to negate your point, but a related pondering : I would assume that the Venn diagram of companies that make claim on property created on their laptops ; vs companies that let you install fresh OS and software from image and repository of your choice and access work network / store proprietary data ; is practically zero. (If you did not install fresh OS from image of your choice, then you did not install software from scratch and should not be confident what's in your work laptop and what it's doing / monitoring)