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Does employer have to tell if they're spying on you through your work computer?
- elromulous 3y agoWhether they legally have to tell you or not, it's good practice to assume they will spy on you. </tinfoil_hat>
- ryandrake 3y agoThis is not tinfoil_hat territory. I thought it was pretty much given that everything you do on company-owned hardware is subject to being monitored and/or logged. Maybe I've worked too long in BigTech, but I don't recall the last company I worked for where this wasn't part of the paperwork you agree to when you start and/or receive a company-supplied device.
- john_the_writer 3y agoSame when I worked in Kmart and Subway. I was on camera while on the clock. When I worked at the bread factory I was on camera while on the clock. I always assume all computer work is the same. I'm on camera all the time. That said I've a chip-clip over the camera and my earphones (plugged into the computer) have a hard mic shutoff.
- asdefghyk 3y agoMy employer said they may or may not be monitoring our usage of the companies assets.
- blairanderson 3y agoNo they don't have to tell you. It is their computer.
- oaiey 3y agoAnd your privacy. Just because you own a knife does not mean you can stick it into someone's body.
- elromulous 3y agoThis can get legally grey very quickly. Can they turn on the webcam without telling you? Can they listen to you? Just because it's their computer doesn't mean they can do anything.
- whynotkeithberg 3y agoExactly this... There are numerous stories of people having their boss call them and ask them about something they're doing that they would only know if watching on video. Apparently this was somewhat common as remote work became common among during COVID where women employees would have their boss spy on them remotely via video and they would realize it because the boss would say some offhanded comment that they wouldn't have known if they weren't watching through the webcam. I do not use my work computer for much outside of work... However, when traveling for work or other times I will 100% do personal things on my computer. Even though I'm devops/sysadmin and had admin rights to disable applications from accessing my macbooks webcam I knew they could override it at anytime they wanted. So I also purchased covers for the webcam & never trusted that I wasn't being spied on via microphone. But any company that does that stuff is just terrible and it's not the way to get the best out of your employees. I am much more likely to put in a lot of extra time outside of work if I can mix in my personal browsing with my work.
- sofixa 3y agoThat varies wildly by jurisdiction. The article describes the various prerequisites in a couple of Australian states/territories (most of whom include advanced notice), and in the EU it goes even further than that, requiring advanced notice and having severe limitations in what your employer can actually monitor. An example court case: > On September 5, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that a private company's decision to dismiss an employee, after monitoring and accessing his instant messages sent from the workplace, violated the employee's right to respect for private and family life https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/05/romanian-chat-messages-read-by-employer-had-privacy-breached-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/05/romanian-chat-me...
- majoe 3y agoTo elobarate on that, the hurdles for monitoring employees are really high. It is always illegal to do it secretly and conversations etc are considered private even if you're in the office and talk with collegues. Also worker's councils hate that stuff and a company would have a really bad time with theirs.
- hef19898 3y agoWhere I live, no, they don't have to tell you. Because they are not allowed to in the forstvolace. If they are allowed, and do, it is a rare exception that is handled a lot like search warrants, and they require reasonable suspicion of the emoloyee doing something fishy (stealing data, cheating with hours...).
- Hamuko 3y agoIt might be their computer, but it's inside my residence. And I do have a legal right to privacy inside my residence.
- acosmism 3y agothere is a grey area. some companies will not ship you a device if you are fully remote (which i personally prefer since I'm most productive on my OS/config of choice) yet all their operations exist on google/microsoft accounts. so if you happen to login on one of these on your personal browser and go about business without thinking twice… its all logged!
- EarthAmbassador 3y agoThere is no better way to destroy employee morale than to spy on them. If only managers would set goals, and let workers achieve them as best they can.
- browningstreet 3y agoTeam goals and dev estimates have the same problems. Managers don’t know how to set goals, and if they set goals, their managers might change or disavow or ignore the previously set goals. I once argued with a toxic founder and he yelled, “You don’t even work 40 hours/week!” So I walked him through it — I arrived before he did, and he saw me leave because he seated himself at the exit. When he had to grant me that I worked plenty of hours, then he yelled, “But you’re not ENGAGED!” And on and on it goes. Same shit, different script.
- sublinear 3y agoDon't work for small businesses or startups unless you're a cofounder or early in your career
- browningstreet 3y agoI was the CTO. Someone’s gotta be numbers 2 thru 5 etc.
- mistyvales 3y agoI actually installed Asahi on my work Macbook for the simple reason that I don't want to do anything personal on the Mac OS partition..
- xcv123 3y agoCan also dual boot a second copy of MacOS on another partition.
- oceanplexian 3y agoMight want to do some research on how remote management works on Macs. They are incredly friendly to corporate spyware, and will pull MDM/remote management in on a fresh install if the serial number matches up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boston_clone 3y agoI don't know how to phrase this more politely, but why do you feel entitled to use a company-issued device for personal use to the point of re-partitioning and installing an unstable OS?
- mistyvales 3y agoOh, you're totally not wrong. I have a bit of leeway with admin rights so I decided it was worth doing. I do understand it is not MY laptop though..
- wetpaws 3y agoIt's corporate device, not corporate os.
- stouset 3y agoI’m generally with you here, but in this specific case the GP’s stated purpose in doing so is to enable doing personal activities on their work device. I think that’s the part I personally balk at a bit (and what I suspect GP was getting at), not necessarily the act of installing whatever you want on the device. Mixing work and personal like that seems a priori a bad idea. In many cases, work can even seize your device from you for legal reasons. Yes, you can keep the personal activities separate on an encrypted partion and otherwise walled off from the work bits. But this all just limits some of the possible downsides and doesn’t make it a good idea.
- kristopolous 3y agoI've been reading a 1988 text by Barbara Garson, "The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past" - it's a series of interviews about primitive bossware, metric tracking and computerized middle management that effects a robbing of personal agency and deskilling of labor through various means of minuscule tracking ... 1988. Taylorism is old and it's coming for you. The book is fine btw... Not the greatest but fairly prescient
- chmod600 3y ago"Your work computer" is (mostly) an oxymoron. If you didn't buy it, its their computer.
- jraph 3y agoIt's a convenient shortcut that surfaces all the time though: "You'll find me at my desk!" (obviously not yours neither, but having to use a periphrasis would be somewhat annoying) (coincidentally, my work laptop, which I chose, belongs to the company but went straight from the manufacturer to my home and I installed the OS and everything myself, and no piece of proprietary software from the company lives in it. I know I'm incredibly lucky on this.)
- elromulous 3y agoExactly. "My work laptop" is shorthand for "the work laptop assigned to me".
- Hamuko 3y agoWho's doing the work on said work computer?
- oaiey 3y agoEver wondered why c suites use their own hardware, separate accounts and do not participate in cooperate platforms like SharePoint? I think privacy (for different reasons) is a key part in that.
- kristopolous 3y agoI always did. I'd show up with my own laptop and leave with it.
- red-iron-pine 3y agodifference is that the C-levels are having off the record chats to protect from the SEC or other regulators.
- dhx 3y ago> "If you’re working from home they can pick up audio and visual images of your private life." The jurisdiction of the authors of this article appears to be Victoria, Australia where it is illegal to record audio and visual images of someone's private conversations or private space at home[1] without a law enforcement reason. Similar applies to other jurisdictions of Australia. Aside from the obvious legal problem, I doubt businesses would want to deal with the potential liabilities of recording and storing footage of someone's kid running past a camera in the background of an employee's home without clothes on, or recording a private conversation an employee has with their lawyer relating to a family law matter. Many Australian organisations would also be reluctant to provide their own employee's access to video surveillance footage from cameras in public locations. There would generally only be a small handful of employee's with access to recorded footage. There is a significant possibility of misuse resulting in negative media attention and fines for the organisation. There is also a cost issue. The more an organisation records, the greater the chance they'll have to respond (at their own cost) to a law enforcement request or response to a court proceeding to reveal the footage. [1] Part 2, Surveillance Devices Act 1999, https://content.legislation.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-12/99-21aa042%20authorised.pdf https://content.legislation.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2...
- andersa 3y agoYou guys get free work computers? I had to buy my own hardware for working remotely. Though that also means there's no crazy spyware on it or unnecessary bloat slowing it down. I might actually prefer this arrangement... Do the large companies usually let you do that at all?
- acosmism 3y agosame lol. if they give you a computer - use it for work! otherwise it is arguably your property and your right to do what you want regardless if they have google workspace etc. just create a separate account
- technion 3y agoIf I need to sign a legal contract asserting that every desktop has bitlocker or the mac equivalent, there needs to be a level of remote management, and I'll be the first one telling people they can't force people to intune enroll personal desktops. So in a lot of cases there will be an argument against your arrangement.
- chadcmulligan 3y agoIn Australia - companies usually provide computers afaik, probably for legal reasons. The default law is if you make something on a work computer then your employer owns it.
- pfisherman 3y agoMixing personal and work business of the same machine is just bad data hygiene. Is it that hard to whip out a mobile phone / tablet when you need to conduct some personal business or procrastinate? This goes hand in hand with the more general principle of maintaining strict compartmentalization between work and personal life. My personal time, devices, online accounts, etc are mine.
- kristopolous 3y agoWhy do you say that? That's what directories and user accounts are there for. I get the preference but the separation is pretty easy
- ffforest 3y ago[dead]
- retSava 3y agoFunny to see this today. I'm doing consulting for a customer, and have an account on their Outlook/Teams setup, while still being associated with another unrelated company. My own computer and equipment. Yesterday I received a bounce email from Outlook - my forwarded email could not be delivered since the recipient didn't exist. Thing is, I didn't forward anything, and there is a c-level guy in this small company that is close to that user but just a keyboard slip away. So I have to assume that for some reason that forwarded email was supposedly interesting and there's either a filter to forward, or they manually log in and forward what's interesting. Either way, getting it in my face is pretty off-putting. Thinking of forwarding that email and add "hey, your surveillance is misconfigured, but here it is anyway".
- deafpolygon 3y agoThey don't have to surveil your computer for e-mail. Assume any on-prem e-mail systems can be read by the admins at said company. The same goes for Office 365 e-mail systems as well.
- technion 3y agoWhat you are saying is absolutely true, but I've worked with some particularly inept executives and they are often identifiable with requests like "I want every email that new staff send bcced to me", which always becomes funny when they set up oof.
- retSava 3y agoYeah I do, it's just a bit on the nose to see that it's someone actually in-this-moment looking through my emails. Not an algo doing a keyword scan, not a save-for-what-ifs. A person, looking through my emails. What makes this even more funny, is that these guys are the ones going "we're a family" and all that.
- nunez 3y agoThis monitoring software is so stupid. What's better: being on your work computer for 14 hrs/day producing nothing of value and/or taking meetings that you're at best a passive observer in, or being on your work computer for 3 hrs/day hitting and exceeding personal/team goals and driving tons of value and spending the remaining 5 work hours living life while being available? I hope we can collectively move away from time-spent-working as the measure of productivity.
- clocot 3y ago[dead]