Don’t use the company device for personal use. It’s just not appropriate, for so many reasons.
I find that having multiple physical computers, each with a very specific purpose, is an excellent way to context switch and maintain that psychological isolation between duties. There are definitely security/privacy benefits as well, but I hesitate to delve into that rabbit hole of a discussion here.
Even that would make me nervous, given keyloggers.
One benefit of working from home for the last few months is that there's no temptation to do anything non-work related on my company machine when my personal machines are right there.
How does this help? I guess it masks the web traffic, but you are still using a potentially compromised keyboard and screen.
BYOD has indeed been a curse.
If the app did give the employees the tools to separate their lives, the employer would churn to another app.
In fact, skilled advertisers and psychologists and the kind of people who develop dark patterns for social media companies[1] likely have more control over it than you have.
[1] and your company’s glorious loyalty oath parade, logos on mugs on your desk, anti-union propaganda posters, slogan you recite on the phone, etc. It is all changing you one way or another.
Compartmentalizing is a valuable Op-Sec practice.
For security purposes we route all internet request through our company VPN to scan for malware. Company notebooks are required to use the VPN tunnel and they do if you don't have admin rights and change that behavior. I think it would be really bad if all netflix traffic from employees gets routed through our companies internet connection. I don't want to put that on netflix support to figure out the problem people are having...
A device that takes in SMS messages only and has a battery that lasts a month...
That said, my statement was about helping people protect themselves. These systems will be used, and for legitimate reasons in many cases. Why not protect yourself from allowing them to overreach into your personal life?
Working requires us to form social relationships with our coworkers to get work done. Oftentimes, we're establishing shared language, and working tempo with coworkers through "inside" jokes, and other human forms of camaraderie. Not only would it be unethical to stamp the social aspect out of our working lives–which make up the majority of our waking hours, and a gross majority of our social ties–but it would also be imprudent, since removing social elements from working relationships would cripple them. It is necessary, and desirable, that we socialize with our coworkers to some extent.
The firm pits individuals–and groups–against one another in competition. Even in an ostensibly friendly, collegial workplace, the zero-sum reality of budgets and headcount encourage workers to jockey for position and push difficult, or unprofitable work onto others. Surveillance like this enables the most manipulative to exploit secret knowledge of the social relationships that are, again, necessary throughout the firm. A secondary effect of surveillance is the chilling effect: trust and camaraderie are hampered by the knowledge that one's every word can be used against them without recourse.
Firms regularly use information freely given to prioritize workers for layoffs. Decades of "employee satisfaction" surveys have facilitated the efficient firing of dissatisfied, burnt-out or mistreated workers. Surveillance offers the same facility, at higher fidelity.
If you are an executive, and you want to maintain dehumanizing working conditions, surveillance is a necessity and a boon. As surveillance increases, our working life becomes more prison-like, and our society progresses towards private autocracy. What astonishes me is how giddily those who profess to love Liberty readily shed it at work.
It's not coincidental that certain forms of right-libertarianism allow for voluntary slavery, which is this taken to its ultimate conclusion.
> It was the agents and overseers sent into the region who were, much like the conquistadors, deeply indebted—in their case, to the Peruvian company that had commissioned them, which was ultimately receiving its own credit from London financiers. These agents had certainly arrived with every intention of extending that web of credit to include the Indians, but discovering the Huitoto to have no interest in the cloth, machetes, and coins they had brought to trade with them, they’d finally given up and just started rounding Indians up and forcing them to accept loans at gunpoint, then tabulating the amount of rubber they owed.
> In reality, then, the Indians had been reduced to slavery; it’s just that, by 1907, no one could openly admit this. A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis.
– David Graeber "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"