Comment by byron4242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by byron4242 | Hacker News Reader

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The OP was about a contractor though. The way I think about somebody who is truly a contractor is that they are their own IT department, and their capabilities in the IT space should be at least on par with whatever the client's IT department enforces for in-house employees.

The above two comments however seem to be arguing from the viewpoint "this is just an individual person and any individual person surely needs babysitting by a big mighty corporate IT department because otherwise they can be expected to do stupid things like losing storage media with important data and not having backups, never doing updates, having their computers full of spyware, intermingling private stuff and work stuff from different clients in such a way that there's data leakage, etc. etc."

If you want to truly treat a contractor as a contractor, you should think about it as your IT needing to interface with their IT in such a way that it makes sense for both parties. And "here, use this laptop" is just frequently a bad solution from the point of view of the contractor's IT.

I also heavily object to the notion that any expectation of privacy goes away on a company laptop.

You can disagree with the expectation of privacy but it’s been held up in court multiple times that personal actions ok a corporate resource are not protected.

Ideologies and realties are different. If you care about personal data, don’t put it on the company. The company however has a huge liability with your personal data. I’ve mentioned else where I have dealt with issues of personal data becoming an issue for the company via blackmail, or in a couple cases, the company was legally required to report child pornography. So yeah, if you don’t want the company to know, don’t put it on their equipment. If you buy dedicated equipment for work, use it for work and work only. If you want to use your machine for Everything, that’s fine, but understand the risks and the lack of an expectation to privacy.

We're agreed that separation of work and private spheres is good practice.

But I'm not sure what country and what legal concept it is that you are referring to when you say "it's been held up in court multiple times that..." I'm based in Germany and have recently undergone GDPR-related training with a lawyer specializing in privacy law. In the training, the lawyer explained court cases that involved regrettable intermingling of work and private data in a company's IT. The result was that the law then started looking at that company's IT as being more akin to a telecommunication provider, with similar legal provisions coming into effect regarding telecommunication privacy.

Also: Anyone who lets their mind jump straight from "privacy" to "porn" is missing a big part of the picture of what privacy is all about. The way I think about it, it's a basic psychological need. Your psyche can be in a "public mode" where it assumes that any and all information flows emanating from you are out there for everyone to see and do with as they please. The result is that you have to put up huge amounts of self control which is psychologically exhausting. Therefore, the psyche seeks private spaces, where you don't need to control yourself as much because you know that nobody is watching.

The fight for privacy in the digital sphere is about ensuring that, just because our psyches are nowadays constantly linked to digital devices, this doesn't result in our psyches having to operate in "public mode" all the time.

It's about establishing clear delineations of who gets to receive what information flows relating to you and how they can potentially use that information against you.

For example: A company does time tracking through Excel sheets, but they also have IT security logs that keep track of people logging into and out of work machines. One day the company decides to run a project: They put the two data sources side by side and identify employees likely to be cheating on their time sheets. They fire the employees. ...this sets in motion a psychological effect in the remaining employees: They realize that they have a very poor understanding of what information the company's IT is collecting, and they don'T know how that information might one day be used against them. So all they can do is assume the worst. That means putting their psyches in "public mode" all the time, assuming the machine knows and sees everything, and the employer will use that information against employees at whatever time and in whatever manner suits them. The psychological damage done by this is precisely what we need to avoid!

And the GDPR will usually actually prohibit such things: The company's register of data processing activities will tie the security logs to the purpose of providing IT security. And it will tie the Excel timesheets to the purpose of time tracking. If you start using the security logs for time tracking purposes, you are using the data cross-purpose and are in violation of the GDPR and risk a hefty fine. This is a model usecase of what the GDPR is actually good for, and it clearly relates to protecting individuals' reasonable expectations of privacy in relation to their company's IT.

Very informative. Thanks.

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