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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

At my first IT job, I spotted some bounce messages from a jobs address at a local big pharma firm. Admittedly, personal email addresses weren’t as common in 1996 as they are now, but still, rookie mistake.

I’ve maintained a strict “don’t do anything personal on a corporate computer” policy for a long time, but I’ve not found that to be a common approach.

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Same here. Air gap your personal and professional life. Separate devices, separate networks (if you work from home), don’t even bring your personal device to work if you don’t really have to.

There was a story a few years back making the rounds on HN where an Apple employee had to turn in her corporate device due to some lawsuit against the company. This happens all the time in big companies. She was outraged at this because she had personal nudes on her corporate device. WTF how could anyone think this was a good idea?

I don't work for Apple or (honestly) know anyone that does, but from at least one news article, I get the impression Apple openly encourages (and maybe even requires) it.

https://www.theverge.com/22648265/apple-employee-privacy-icl...

> I get the impression Apple openly encourages (and maybe even requires) it.

When I worked at Apple I needed a personal iCloud account to set up my corp MacBook. I simply created a new dummy personal account just for that. Nobody's auditing your iCloud account to make sure it's your "real" personal account or anything.

Yeah about that. That's one of the biggest weirdness in related to Macbooks on a corp environment, why do I need an unrelated account to do basic stuff on an Apple machine

It all depends on how they manage them. You can and should just make a youremail@company.com icloud account. I'm actually surprised that's not the norm so they can take over stuff like activation lock.

I don't use a personal icloud account on my work computer... it's not even allowed lol.

I have a “work personal” Google account for Chrome for similar reasons.

At my last job I used a dummy iCloud account at the system level, but you can log into a separate account for the app store, which was necessary to avoid having to re-buy some apps I depend on.

Just as I was leaving they were in the process of replacing everyone's computer with new ones that were much more locked down.

Apple encourages it, however, it's not required.

Meta requires you to link your personal meta account with your work identity.

Meta requires you to link a personal account to your work identity. Similar to Apple, they don't check to see if it was created just for the purpose.

Meta also requires in their TOS that you have only one account and that it uses your “real” identity, so you’d be in violation of TOS with your work account.

Meta specifically says during onboarding to not create a work only account.

> I get the impression Apple openly encourages (and maybe even requires) it.

To take nudes?

To store them on a corporate device. Weirdly the requirement originated from the IT department.

Roy Trenneman made that policy and got Jen Barber to unknowingly approve it

> There was a story a few years back making the rounds on HN where an Apple employee had to turn in her corporate device due to some lawsuit against the company.

Smarter decision is for the corp to just buy your device for you. Then it's a personal device, and at least in some cases I'm aware of, not a government record at least.

Very doable for a phone where your "work" is limited to messages, webmail and calls.

My advice to young colleagues: never do anything on a work computer that you wouldn’t mind your boss (or her boss) seeing.

Being greeted with a Department of Defense splash screen before login reminding me that everything I did on that computer was subject to monitoring formed that habit early, and I still can’t shake it, no matter how long I work in Germany, for a German firm with a rather assertive works council.

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