I don’t see why anyone would do anything else.
“This guy was browsing incel forums from this time to this time”
Which court in what land uses that information?
Sounds kind of mythical, especially since I’m sure there’s an army of other people on idiot forums like that who are nonetheless performing fine.
EDIT: Okay, you guys hit me with sufficient downvotes that I’m rate limited so I know the predominant view is different.
Fine. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you this. If some rando IT dude is going through folks’ computers after they quit and I find out, I am quitting your company and telling everyone. I have never done that to anyone reporting to me and no company has ever done that to me. I can’t believe you’d accept these work conditions. Wild.
"This guy was conducting illegal business using the company's network"
"This guy was running his own mining rig on company servers"
It's not hard to think of actual cases that happen.
Y’all are playing me if you think that.
That said, I agree with the commenters that I wouldn't want to work somewhere that did this as a matter of routine. I always have my work laptop encrypted with a key only I know and I have not (yet) been forced to give work root access for management. I'm always confident handing in my laptop that they couldn't find anything even if there was something.
Are you a lawyer?
> Which court in what land uses that information?
That seems like a question for the legal department, not for the IT department.
You're doing this thing that smart people do (I know because I do it myself if I'm not careful) where you way overstep your area of expertise. It's not a good look, avoid the trap.
However, that's just not the world we live in. From the perspective of an employer, you can make your choice to behave ethically regardless of the legal implications, and that's a choice that I would laud you for. But from the perspective of an employee, you shouldn't assume that your employer will behave ethically: on the contrary, I would always assume that your employer is going to go through your computer when you give it back. You can fight that if you want, but that's not the hill I would choose to die on, as there are much worse privacy violations going on.
If you want to see how bad things have gotten, freeze your credit, sign up for credit monitoring, and then start applying for jobs, and see what happens. About 75% of jobs I've applied for in the last few years have tried to pull credit reports--and you can't really stop them as long as they do a "soft" credit check (freezing credit doesn't block this).
Every large company I've worked at or heard of it's pretty much assumed that IT may monitor everything you do on their machine. Everyone knew this. Which is why you don't use the company laptop for personal use.
I have been using my work laptop quite heavily for personal use and I would prefer not to stop honestly.
I believe my intentions are pure and to provide value, I understand world is not perfect, but I would not want to work for an employer that needed to monitor me.
Lastly, the companies or specific malicious admins might simply not care about the legality and still monitor you - either for company reasons or simply to stir through your data. If they have admin access to your computer, it's simply not your computer.
But it is stupid to allow any old IT staff to do so, and this thread is a good illustration of why: because most IT staff do not have the discipline or smarts to keep what they learn sufficiently confidential. Allowing IT staff to browse the files of other staff at will can lead to other HR problems such as harassment or even blackmail, or loss of corporate reputation if people post embarrassing stuff in, say, a public HN thread.
The ability should be exercised only under the supervision of a lawyer, which limits bad behavior and creates attorney-client privilege for discussions of what might be found.
I worked at a place that did have good 'secrecy' around most monitoring. While I was one of three people outside of Infosec that managed to find out that someone was let go because they were caught exfiltrating client/employee PIFI... I'm pretty sure nobody who was possibly compromised got informed.
This was a place that was so concerned with image that the handbook was about as strict as what my Sister had to deal with when teaching at a Catholic school. Image was everything to them.
Because that is the smart thing to do. I got to purchase my laptop when I left the company, and they still wiped it out before handling it. It protects them and it protects me. I do not want access to any company resource, it can only hurt me. And they are not interested anymore on what was in the laptop either.
Sure it’s company hardware, and you get to do this shit but damn that shit would be like “I gotta get out of here” if I heard IT was scanning people’s browser history for sucking at their jobs.
EDIT: The lawsuit thing makes this even worse. If I even heard that someone was suing their employees for poor performance I am like straight up blackballing that company and all of its damn subsidiaries as places to work. Like my friends would know, my family would know, friends of my family would know. I’m sorry, this is straight up unacceptable to me.
Unless this guy was sexually harassing people, I'm curious how this is going to protect anyone from any kind of liability.
>you should remember that the laptop belongs to the company and you have zero rights to privacy on it, so conduct yourself appropriately.
Yes, but as others have mentioned, just because the company has the right to do that doesn't mean it's either ethical OR good. No one here was asserting the right to privacy on company owned hardware.
I Never have work email on any other device but works.
I do not know how it works in your country, but anything that you discover of his personal life becomes a liability for the company. If he had AIDS and now you get that knowledge and it leaks, you may find the company fined for big money. In Europe, again and again, companies are forbidden to use any knowledge gained spying on employees.
What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.
I strongly agree that IT needs ethical education. That you have access to some information does not mean that you have the right to access it or that it is moral to do so.
>What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.
In our case, we would and could never investigate someone for any reason besides HR and/or legal explicitly requesting it for a specific reason and telling us what they wanted us to look for and why. "Fishing expeditions" weren't permitted. (There were a few occasions where such fishing expedition requests did come from them, and our managers would push back and basically professionally tell them to fuck off.)
I'm not sure of any specific laws or liabilities, but I'm sure we also would (and should) have likely been sued if we discovered some sensitive personal information about an employee and that information then leaked. If we inadvertently stumbled across personal things like that during the course of a specific investigation, we would always ignore it and not make any record of it. We didn't care about someone's personal life and didn't intentionally ever look at anything related to it.
Due to the nature of the investigations, it was often unavoidable that we'd end up seeing something at least somewhat personal, even if it's just some random website they habitually browsed appearing multiple times in their browsing history.
So, we would never look at an employee's computer or network traffic "just to see what they were doing" or just because we could. That would definitely be extremely unethical and unprofessional, and if management discovered any of us doing that we surely would and should have been fired. However, I'm not sure if there are actually any laws against that in the US if it's disclosed in the employment contract.
Well, an obvious one is "did we fire him for cause or will we have to pay more unemployment"...
Fortunately that idea was beaten to a bloody pulp by the HR team before it got off the ground. But you would not believe the mall cop mentality in many companies.