Even if I couldn't read the email (which I can, but fortunately have never actually had the need to or done so), I can always reset a password and gain full and instant access.
You should always assume your employer can see your enterprise correspondence. G Suite or not.
Just to expand here. You should assume that your employer has access to _everything_ that you do with their assets. If you are trying to maintain privacy from your employer for whatever reason, do not use your work phone/laptop/email/etc.
For example, one day your laptop forcibly restarts and afterwards you're locked out. Then a day later, you get the call that you were canned.
So always keep private communication separate and get private phone numbers / email addresses from coworkers that you get along well with. The company can delete your extension and email address, but with a bit of preparation that doesn't have to be the end of your personal relationships.
I hear this a lot and it seems like sound advice, but always leaves me with questions.
Sure, my employer can see what URL's I am hitting, what applications are installed, their usage, and if they want they could even decrypt https traffic, take screenshots without my knowledge, key-log, turn on microphone and camera too.
I mean, I won't hesitate to open my personal gmail, read news, make comments on social media sometimes (like this), perform online "errands". At the back of mind, however, I wonder if someone is seeing what I am doing.
It makes me wonder, what is typical? Under what kinds circumstances would the most draconian measures (like screenshots) be taken? How much latitude are IT folks given? Are there ways to detect when really ugly things like keyloggers/cameras/mics being controlled by whatever "enterprise IT" software suite?
It seems IT folks don't talk about this much. The dominant advice is always don't use work computer for _anything_ but work. The reality is that almost everyone in every profession takes that advice with a grain of salt.
You should redirect this question to each HR department: how much does HR want to protect a company from its (possibly) rogue employees?
It seems like a lot of effort to monitor screens, it makes me think there has to be a compelling reason, and not just browsing around looking for "problems".
depends. it can often be chalked up to management having too much time on their hands, or busy work delegated to use up part of the day.
I worked for an ecommerce site that keylogged everyone's computer and was tasked with going through the recorded input for someone that quit on bad terms to find out "if she'd done anything". it was a colossal waste of time, and we only learned that she was into furry websites
We never looked at anyone's activity without a clear reason, but that reason wasn't always very justifiable by my personal standards. However, I'd say most of it was necessary (like when tracing root cause of an alert or infection). My naive guess is this is probably pretty close to how it is in most big US companies.
For the times that were unnecessary (assessing "productivity"), our team, including our managers, always tried to provide as much evidence and guidance as possible that would work in the employee's favor, because we all knew it was complete bullshit and a big overreach. It's also very difficult to tell exactly what someone was or wasn't doing at specific times just by their browsing history. (We didn't have screen recording spyware or anything like that.) I'd say 98% of investigations were necessary and 2% were bullshit like those.
Reading emails or IMs was extremely rare and reserved for people replying to scammers/phishers, or accusations of serious misconduct or crimes.
1 - some program is scanning ingoing/outgoing data looking for compliance violations (typically finance, some classified work; should be for medical privacy/PII but I don't see much of that happening). Also scans for liability issues such as porn at work etc. Easier to screen that stuff out up front rather than later, frankly.
2 - you have a highly restrictive job (e..g call center) and are being spot monitored from time to time; statistics are likely kept continuously. Distopian but yes, happens.
3 - Sysadmin ends up looking at some of your mail while debugging a problem or doing some investigation not necessarily related to you e.g. some employee is terminated for fraud: let's look at their correspondence, some of which -- innocently -- is from you. Or there was a disk crash and some data is being reconstructed, which includes your call logs or email or whatever.
The third case is the most common and is why there is often a blanket "we can read and get all your data" statement in the employee handbook. There are others, and you can guess them.
Most email servers/services have a setting to keep deleted emails for a period of time. Most corporations also have a separate email server for execs that have different settings. This is above and beyond compliance settings that also email retention for different periods of time. Then there are also backups and archiving...you get the idea.
AFAIK, resetting an individual GSuite account's password is the only way GSuite Admin can access individual account's emails. Is there any other way to get access?
For GSuite basic subscriptions, there is a 30GB quota per inbox, having BCCs for every account's emails will like exceed the plan allowance. I doubt it would work if you exceed the account quota allowed for the subscription plan.
Also consider that the first amendment isn't absolute and there is certain material that is highly unsavory, eg child pornography, that party B doesn't even want the potential of possessing.
There are certainly nefarious usages for that level of access as well, but I can imagine legitimate usage exists as well.
Some companies build it into their systems to automatically catch and mask that data, sometimes someone has to rollup their sleeves and do it manually.
I'd wager that 95%+ of orgs have tons of sensitive customer data scattered into chat messages in Slack, Teams, Hangouts, etc that would horrify most of us here.
Check out this: - https://cloud.google.com/dlp - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY3PjFpI3rE
My least enjoyable job would be going into the admin to recover emails "deleted" by disgruntled employees who got wind that they were about to be let go. Why they tried to delete their emails - I'll never know. They should've realised that Google hates deleting anything from their clouds.
One of my happiest days at that job was the day I got told I didn't have to be a GSuite admin anymore and could go do some proper coding work instead.
Once our service account has been granted access, we can assume the role of any user and access anything we have permission for. So, you should assume your IT administrator can also access all your emails, since they're likely to be the person that grants permission to the service account.
[0]https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference/users/m...
Edit: an administrator can also create an API token with org-wide credentials, allowing her to read, write, and delete messages from any user's inbox.
I had an employer who insisted that after I leave, every email I receive to my corporate address be forwarded to him. I remember asking a lawyer how legal this is and not receiving a conclusive answer. (Still interested in an answer for CA+NY if someone knows)
Yes, it is totally legal for them to do that, there is no question, and it wouldn't make sense for it to be any other way.
I'm sure jurisdictions vary, but in Norway, excepting any written concent, your employer may not read mail addressed to you by name.
Personally addressed work email likely (but not certainly) fall in a similar category.
Like, who would use their work mailing address with a medical clinic? The only physical mail I've ever had sent to my workplace is maybe the occasional December parcel that I need to conceal from its ultimate recipient. We're long past the days where anyone's work email address is their only (or even primary) email address.
- A politician with a state-provided residence in the capital city.
- A soldier living in a barracks
- A teacher living at a boarding school during the term, or someone very senior at a university with an on-campus house/apartment. Or a PhD student.
- A vicar or priest living at the vicarage
- A diplomat or embassy staff posted abroad
Certainly for myself many years ago as a university student, I acknowledged that my lodgings were temporary and had anything of any importance at all sent to my parents' address.
You'd be surprised. For those of us here on HN, your statement has been true for decades (for some of us).
But for the average 'worker', there are still way too many who's only computer is the 'work laptop' and who's only email address is 'the work email address'. This tends to be the tech-unsavy and/or tech-fearful crowd that falls into this bucket (who also don't browse HN, so we never interact with them here), but they are still present, and there are far more in this bucket than most tech-savy folks realize.
As recently as 10 years ago I would have agreed but now smartphones and tablets are so common I think more people have an email-capable personal device, and probably a “free” email address.
Just about a month or so ago the union at $job emailed around to again warn members that, yes, management does monitor your work machines, and indicated that just recently several employees were targeted for using their work laptop at home, after hours, for personal purposes, and one of the personal purposes was one of the specific 'uses' (porn) that management keeps a close watch out for and goes after users for accessing on their work machines.
Someone hiding their visit from a spouse?
Expectations of privacy - even for corporate e-mail - is a thing some places. To what extent it applies tends to depend on a whole range of things.
The productive part of the population is treated like children in the US. Daddy gives you health insurance and reads you diary. If daddy no longer likes you, daddy cancels you health insurance but still reads your mail.
I've also experienced where I've emailed people who left and received immediate automated replies informing me of the change and providing me with a new contact person.
I've never, ever experienced a time where I've emailed person@company[dot]com and received a casual reply like "Hey man, I quit that place. Hit me up and we can grab beers!"
And I think anybody would be shocked if that were the case. Especially if you kept getting those emails as a former employee and no other current employees were getting them also. Nevermind mailboxes cost money or physical resources most of the time. To expend those resources to all former employees indefinitely is not practical. And I don't want to keep my mailboxes at former employers anyway. I have enough notifications on my phone to be batting away vendors and suppliers from previous employers.
Additionally, if you work for a company or industry where such correspondence must be preserved and tendered on request due to applicable laws or regulations, such organizations are legally required to have access to all employee emails.
I would assume even just to do business fluidly they might need access.
1. My ISP provides me internet access, but they are not entitled to collect my bank information when I access my bank account.
2. Depending on the nature of the corporation, it may not be legal for an individual to forward emails in the manner described. Consider: what if the email account belonged to a lawyer or doctor? Client confidentiality probably trumps many other legal concerns here.
3. Is said manager part of the IT/InfoSec department within this organization? If not, they may be circumventing organizational controls, which in itself may not be legal.
Context is important.
Under European data protection laws, for example, many countries have considered the privacy restrictions to extend to employee e-mail addresses.
This includes Norway, for example, where employees have extensive rights to prevent employers from accessing their corporate e-mail accounts without substantial safeguards to prevent them from accessing personal information, and including rights to be notified where possible, be present, be able to respond and challenge the access etc.
You can find a lengthy (in Norwegian, though Google translate ought to do a decent job) walkthrough of the rules here [1].
Not everywhere treats people as serfs at work.
[1] https://www.datatilsynet.no/personvern-pa-ulike-omrader/pers...
The corporation owns the email server, so their choice when you leave for whatever reason, is either to disable the account entirely (or give a bounce message) or keep it active.
Is your question really on the legality of the latter case, i.e. once you've left a company can they keep your email address live and perhaps even respond from it?
So in that case it is really jurisdictional. The US falls down pretty heavily on the corporate-owns-everything, but not everywhere does.
In my experience It's pretty common for companies to retain emails of people who have had outside contacts at least for a while, so nothing gets dropped on the floor, usually redirected to a supervisor or whomever took over the projects.