Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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I was working in a throughout computing problem domain. About the time I got there, some asshole in HR had everyone’s (current and former employees) tax information on their work laptop and lost it. Tens of thousands of people, because there was no policy against putting such information on portable equipment.

And as far as I’m aware there still isn’t. No, within the year (might have been a lawsuit, I can’t recall) new policy became everyone’s machine has whole disk encryption. Including engineering. So my software was instantly 30% slower, and a half a day added to setting up any new machine. I don’t know how many times I had to explain that it’s not our code that got slower, the whole company got slower. It took me months of work to get us back to zero.

That person should have been run off and anyone in their dept caught doing the same should have been put on probation. I don’t know how you figure that it’s “fair” for everyone to suffer for the mistakes of one member. In a small team setting? Perhaps. But not for something like this.

Thinking about the policy in terms of punishments and fairness isn’t the right approach. Something happened that cost the company a great deal of resources, so the company is trying to prevent such a thing from happening again.

It may be doing a poor job at that, but it isn’t punishing you and it isn’t about fairness. It’s trying to prevent a future mistake. And because the company is a single entity, it is the company choosing to bear the cost.

It may make your job harder and they may not modify its expectations properly after imposing this cost on you, but that isn’t punishment or fairness. It is poorly thought out systems.

"Something must be done. This is something, so we will do it."

I don't know if encryption was the right policy response here (it seems to be a very good idea regardless due to theft/hacking possibilities), but I'm OK with this sort of policy sometimes.

Full disk encryption is a fair response because it won't be feasible to enumerate every type of situation that results in sensitive data being put on the laptop (such as temporary files or source code). If someone was going to just add tax numbers to a list it leaves a lot out; if they say "sensitive data" it leaves a lot open to interpretation; if they list everything they can think of it'll be impossible to properly comply while still getting work done.

So perhaps it was a heavy handed approach handed down mindlessly, but it could also have been someone looking at the bigger picture. Knowing the intent as others said would help.

You act like this policy was intended as punishment instead of as risk mitigation.

Mandating full disk encryption is easy for IT to enforce. A policy of not putting sensitive information on laptops is valuable, but difficult to enforce. Encryption is a sound way to reduce the risk of harm when that policy is inevitably broken.

Full disk encryption also been the company-wide policy of everywhere I've worked in recent memory, fwiw.

so your job involved none of the company's IP?

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