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Comment by nasalgoat | Hacker News Reader

We were investigating the employee as part of their offboarding.

> We were investigating the employee as part of their offboarding.

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.

Legal reasons for pending litigation. And we're not in Europe.

(I'm in the US and have worked a similar job as the parent poster and have had to do similar things on several occasions.)

>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.

> What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway?

Well, an obvious one is "did we fire him for cause or will we have to pay more unemployment"...

Okay, man, I’ll trust that you’re doing this because they were stealing stuff or something like that but if it’s just sucking at their job then damn, dude. That’s like kinda a shitty thing.

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.

It's important to document and archive the contents for liability reasons, but the takeaway here is that you should remember that the laptop belongs to the company and you have zero rights to privacy on it, so conduct yourself appropriately.

Depends where. Here in Europe it has been said that a Personal folder cannot be looked at by the company. But ofc it can ask you to delete it or fire you if you spend too much time idling but Personal data is Personal.

This is a major cultural difference between US and EU. In the U.S., data is only Personal if it's on a Personal device.

>It's important to document and archive the contents for liability reasons

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.

Agreed. If he's already been let go, who cares what's on his laptop?

I assume it's for liability reasons in case they start a lawsuit.

I pretty much assume they're watching everything I do on a work computer. I don't do anything that would be too embarrassing to see sitting printed out on my supervisor's desk.

Same here. It's my only Windows machine and the only one that reliably prints some PDFs. If they cared that I'm printing out MLP RPG sheets to play with my daughter I'll have that conversation.

I Never have work email on any other device but works.

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