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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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