If you use your home computer to RDP into your work computer, what would be the correct answer to the question? The "work" occurs on the company-owned computer, but you are typing on the keyboard of your personally-owned computer.
* A warning banner is displayed when you connect to the VPN / network / asset that states that use of the resource voids your expectation of privacy, you consent to monitoring, and you acknowledge they can inspect personal devices etc
* You signed a policy document acknowledging that they can monitor you and that connecting to a company resource brings your personal device in scope of monitoring and seizure
* You committed a crime, the police become involved, and a search warrant is issued.
If you do not sign such a policy document, they do not have evidence of a criminal (ie not civil) infraction, and they do not display a warning banner, then you can claim reasonable expectation of privacy (meaning you were ignorant of their policy), refuse a search, and there isn't much they can do to my knowledge. In this specific case you would have to talk to a lawyer, but I would just be safe and use only work assets for work.
I'm guessing the law isn't that forward thinking though. Maybe I should keep a <$200 mini-PC, just to RDP into work so I have no problem giving up that machine.
Doesn't help you. Either your personal devices are in scope or not. If they are, then they all disappear and you're unlikely to get them back.
Investigators don't trust the subjects of the investigation to tell them what devices are in scope or not. If your devices are in scope, they'll take everything that has any chance of having data on it.
(Source: many many reports from subjects of such investigations.)
Not at all. Many companies actually do the opposite. A previous company I worked for had a 30 day email deletion policy, though we could setup special folders for 13 month retention on emails.
At another company, we were in the backup space and some enterprises had very restrictive backup and archive policies. One was to the point that our backup software was pretty much useless.
To limit liability, files that are not involved any ongoing legal issue such as a lawsuit are deleted as soon as possible without interrupting the business. Once there is a lawsuit, any relevant documents or emails can be deleted. This is all from the point of view for civil lawsuits. I assume gov't investigations are similar.