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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

"What country are you from where it is normal that a company is logging and spying on its employers? "

This is everywhere.

"I have a company laptop but there is no logging whatsoever."

I suggest they very well could be logging your web requests. This is very common.

It's not like your manager is necessarily even going to have access to this. They're not interested in what you are doing, generally.

But if there is a serious security problem, or a legal problem ... this will then be used.

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I don't know if you mean logging of traffic on the company network or all network traffic on the laptop itself. The latter is definitely not happening here.

How do you know it's not happening?

Because I installed it myself and nobody else touched it. If you suspect your employer to secretly keep logs of your internet traffic to one-day claim your IP rights you seriously need to search for a new employer.

I'm really sorry, but this is naive. It may be true that in your case you have complete control over your laptop and there is no possibility of logging, but this is not broadly the case, and it is not a good litmus test of an employer. If you start working for a company with lots of employees and valuable proprietary data, they will have access to take a look at what you've done with your company computer. And not because they're evil, but because "insider risk" is a real problem that scales with a company's size and success. An employee could be looking up private information of an ex-partner, or sending a zip file of customer credit card data to their private email account, the company could be sued and need to provide information on those acts during discovery, etc. I think good employers should assume good faith by their employees and should not employ the sort of active monitoring and productivity tracking stuff that exists, but I think having the ability to reactively look at backups and system logs is important.

They'll log at a network level, not from software on your laptop.

If you work remotely obviously they can't.

But if you work in an office, there's a very good chance they are.

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