That's not to say I disagree with the sentiment that this is something employers (and other organizations providing access to devices) should be obliged to disclose, but that is perhaps more of a legal and educational issue.
Hah. That's precisely the argument I have made when arguing that there should be an opt-out for addon signature verification (needing admin permissions to toggle it if they insist) because you already utterly lost the security game if someone had admin on the machine.
But no, they argue that they must defend against malware with admin permissions injecting addons into the browser. Because that's a fight worth fighting and the perception of the browser's security is somehow more important than user freedom.
The "quietly" adjective suggests they are malicious. Which means they should be reported to AV vendors (including microsoft) instead of being used as a boogeyman when arguing against user freedoms.
My first instinct is to say "it's important to not install crap software, you need to reasonably trust the software you install". But I immediately recognize that it's un-intuitive that Adobe and Microsoft and Symantec and McAfee are not on the "trusted" list. (Office and .Net have silently installed problematic Firefox extensions in the past.)
I don't really have a conclusion here, just, it sucks.
Employees are often required to install local certs (or applications/scripts that do that) - that doesn't mean the host is entirely compromised.
If they are forced to install those certs, then the computers they use belong to their employers, and those computers are obeying their proper owners. I fail to see the problem.
Don't use your work computer for things you don't want your work to be able to detect, intercept & modify.
Don't use your work computer for things you don't want your work to be able to detect, intercept & modify.
You know who also has that right? Prisons.
I don't have things sent to the office unless they comply with my employer's policies (e.g. I'd never have a weapon mailed here), and unless I'm happy with my employer having information about my packages.
I'm curious what line of reasoning would justify me doing such a thing and expecting privacy.
> You know who also has that right? Prisons.
You know who also has that right? You, on any network and hardware you own. My employer owns my laptop and the network it's connected to: of course it has every right to inspect its own property.
Careful there: there's a difference between capability and right. Many legislations forbid employers to put surveillance cameras in the bathroom for instance. There is a level of privacy employees can legally expect.
E-mail is similar: if your employer intercepts your e-mail just because you read it at work, it is likely a breach of correspondence secrecy (in France it would be). This likely applies even if you're at fault for using the company's resources on personal matters.
While "don't trust your employer's network" is elementary operational security everyone should be taught at school, 90% of the population don't know what computers can do, let alone how they work. Because of that, their expectations are social, not technical.
For my last gig, I worked at some company on behalf of another. This workplace was quite explicit about intercepting and monitoring everything. I pondered for a second whether I should use this place's computers to log to my employer's webmail. I gave up and did it, because I wasn't going to read or write work emails outside of office hours.
Personal stuff however I didn't dare.
This might be true in the US but illegal in various other countries!
Work stuff… When you use the work computer to do stuff on behalf of your employer, it's not really private, and could arguably be monitored. (There are work regulations that limit how you can use that data however. Benchmarking for instance is forbidden in France.)
The problem is, since proxy servers cannot automatically distinguish work related activities from personal errands, they tend to cast a wide net. The implied distrust kinda disgusts me, but I reckon this puts big companies in a delicate situation: one does not simply trust thousands of people —too many single points of failure.
The law says that if employers own the computers they provide to employees, then employers have broad latitude to monitor how those computers are used.
A different law says that only the recipient of a US Postal letter may open it. If you receive a personal letter at your office via US Postal Service, your employer cannot legally open it.
I'm not up to date on what the law says about FedEx or UPS.
If it involves patching and recompiling the browser it wouldn't be that trivial for your average sysadmin. Besides I don't see why the admin would be hostile to the users being aware that they're being monitored. As you point out companies generally disclose that anyway.
I don't really know how widespread key pinning is but if it's reserved to the more sensitive websites (banking, e-commerce etc...) it might make sense to at least issue a warning.
Most Google properties use key pinning in some form (though AFAIK through static pins rather than HTTP headers). I would suspect that most users in that group would see such a warning at least daily.
> I don't really know how widespread key pinning is [...]
"Visitors may be presented with a warning if they're behind a middlebox and you deploy HPKP" would probably be a good way to slow down HPKP deployment even further.
Agreed. We could argue all day about companies who think they need to intercept traffic, but why would anyone who believed they had a legitimate reason to do so want to do so silently without any notification?
A persistent infobar near the address bar, for instance, would work nicely. And anyone working in a hostile environment with such monitoring imposed on them (a bank, for instance) would then have a much clearer warning that they shouldn't use their work device for anything they want to keep private.