Which countries don’t allow a company to monitor activity on company equipment and company networks during company time?
For the employer to open/read such communication would be highly illegal, akin to opening others private snail mail.
I do believe that this also extends to corporate issued phones and computers. Especially since you’re automatically taxed for “private use” of such equipment when assigned.
so you get charged a tax when an employer gives you equipment required for work? What happens if you can't afford that tax then?
This feels very wrong - taxing someone for a potential benefit when it is not proven that such benefit exists.
The vast majority of people prefer to also use the car privately, and pay the tax (which is reasonable, if taxation is reasonable).
Cars that keep rotating between drivers are not subject to that (but exact record keeping of driver and trip required to avoid tax)
Similarly, employer provided phone subscription is assumed to be partly private use (50% of monthly subscription cost considered a a taxable benefit iirc), not sure what hoops you need to jump through to prove it is not private use at all. (But phone plans are cheap - excellent domestic plans are $10 or so)
Obviously this only happens when the equipment you get can plausibly be used for personal purposes. Such as a company car.
> What happens if you can't afford that tax then?
That's extremely unlikely.
I think you need to specify "here" to get an answer to that question.
That has nothing to do with putting private email in a private folder on the company mail server, near as I can tell, and nothing in that statement would address the statement about companies monitoring use of company equipment and network etc.
Since they’d need to know even in the private email case what they folder names were, for instance, to know there even WAS private email.
People have legitimate expectations of privacy in the office and/or during working time.
Employment means selling your skills and effort, not becoming a servant or a slave in a feudal society.
Additionally, having delicate information in the hands of the company in general or sysadm/security engineers create a ton of liabilities.
There has to be a balance between security needs, corporate surveillance, privacy and worker rights.
That requires them to use tools which can easily let them know, for instance, what websites someone is visiting, and what executables are executing on the machine, what devices are being accessed and when, etc.
It’s pretty fundamental. An individual looking to secure their machine would need to do the same thing.
If a company abuses that to spy on every waking moment of an employee, that is obviously abusive (barring cases of investigating legitimate suspected abuse by the employee I guess?). But you’d need to somehow codify in law the line, and I haven’t see anyone having any success here so far.
I have seen employees steal massive amounts of trade secrets, secretly steal customers from employers, run porn sites from company equipment, etc.
I’ve also seen employees so creepy stuff like stalking customers, stalking other employees, harassing other employees using this tech too.
Personally, I’ve always kept employer laptops and stuff closed and off when not used, and try to segregate personal and work equipment, but that’s been more to avoid something embarrassing coming up during a presentation or the like.
People could be making backhanded deals on their phones or they could be having an urgent confidential conversation with their doctor or spouse. Should the company record and review phone calls?
People could be stalking customers/coworkers or making deals in the bathroom. Or they could be using it for more personal purposes. Should the bathrooms have CCTV with audio?
People could be selling company data in the company parking lot, in the mall or at home near/using the company laptop/phone that is permitted to be used for personal reasons, or just mandated to be near them, or they could do the same thing without presence or use of any company equipment. Where do you draw the line, and at what point is it even sufficient to prevent losing information etc.?
Do you trust your employees? All trust can be abused, yet how can the company function if they don't trust their employees at all?
Imagine I were to die in the office in some embarrasing way, on company time, in full view of company CCTV, do they have the right to upload the video to YouTube to make money from it?
What if they record audio of me at home, can they publish it? Can they show it to anyone at the company?
What if audio is recorded outside of compaby time by a company laptop thats had its lid closed? What if it's recording 24/7?
Are they allowed to snoop on traffic of my home network? If I have a home camera thats not password protected, can they help themselves to that Video?
If my network drive has no password, is it okay if they help themselves to those files?
I can't think of which law stops a company sharing a video of your death - presymably they own the copyright
Even more restrictive countries like Germany are fine with this.