That does rather vary by country - Germany has some strict rules about what employers can and can't monitor.
Also, some organisations explicitly choose not to monitor computer usage too closely (e.g. by using proxies that intercept HTTPS traffic) out of the fear that this would expose the organisation to greater liabilities in the case that someone was doing personal banking from their work PC.
This can't work, but, having sold it/ bought it then there's a lot of pressure to make it work.
The best case scenario with such products is that some fraction of traffic is unmolested but the product owner policies do not actually control what that traffic is (which might surprise them and make their overall security policies ineffective but otherwise is no big deal)
The worst case is that in the attempt to do this "selective proxying" some or all traffic security is compromised. Non-participants aren't affected (except it might introduce denial of service) but active participants give up potentially all security. e.g. the company laptop that's configured to the trust the MITM proxy, might not only be uploading your bank password to some screen accessible by an entry level IT guy it might also just inadvertently remove the security of the bank connection altogether so that now random bad guys on the Internet can see everything, whoops.
Coworker has remote access to other coworkers machine and is abusing this trust to install spyware, setting a president for other "jokes".
Sorry man, I don't see anything funny here.
CJO in modern terms.
Nothing was seen that couldn't be seen by shoulder-surfing.
As ridiculous as it sounds to someone in either camp, both were okay.
The former was an organization where everyone fundamentally trusted each other, and the concept of anyone doing anything really wrong was just foreign. It's so dissimilar to most business in tech today (which are either trillion-dollar megacorps, or places where people jump jobs every 3 years). This was an organization where people stuck around for decades, and everyone really knew each other. Doors weren't locked, and everyone had access to everything. It worked well.
The latter is like most of the tech industry today. My machine is private, and if you've hacked my minesweeper, I'm going to reinstall my OS. I don't know you well enough to know you didn't root my machine or steal my personal files. I'm also talking to HR since you shouldn't work here.
Friendship comes fast when you're in your early 20's and there's lots of free time to screw around. It's twenty years later now, and I probably wouldn't do that to any of my coworkers. I probably would do it to any of my siblings though. How invasive you can get away with a prank being without upsetting the person targeted is largely based on trust.
When I pranked my friend, the company we were at had probably 30 people working for it, and there were maybe 16 of us in tech support total. It's easy to trust others when you're such a small group, because you can actually know most the people you work with. If your company employs even hundreds of people, that's much harder to do.