Does employer have to tell if they're spying on you through your work computer?
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
The jurisdiction of the authors of this article appears to be Victoria, Australia where it is illegal to record audio and visual images of someone's private conversations or private space at home[1] without a law enforcement reason. Similar applies to other jurisdictions of Australia. Aside from the obvious legal problem, I doubt businesses would want to deal with the potential liabilities of recording and storing footage of someone's kid running past a camera in the background of an employee's home without clothes on, or recording a private conversation an employee has with their lawyer relating to a family law matter.
Many Australian organisations would also be reluctant to provide their own employee's access to video surveillance footage from cameras in public locations. There would generally only be a small handful of employee's with access to recorded footage. There is a significant possibility of misuse resulting in negative media attention and fines for the organisation. There is also a cost issue. The more an organisation records, the greater the chance they'll have to respond (at their own cost) to a law enforcement request or response to a court proceeding to reveal the footage.
[1] Part 2, Surveillance Devices Act 1999, https://content.legislation.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2...
When I worked at the bread factory I was on camera while on the clock.
I always assume all computer work is the same. I'm on camera all the time.
That said I've a chip-clip over the camera and my earphones (plugged into the computer) have a hard mic shutoff.
So I have to assume that for some reason that forwarded email was supposedly interesting and there's either a filter to forward, or they manually log in and forward what's interesting. Either way, getting it in my face is pretty off-putting.
Thinking of forwarding that email and add "hey, your surveillance is misconfigured, but here it is anyway".
Do the large companies usually let you do that at all?
The book is fine btw... Not the greatest but fairly prescient
I think privacy (for different reasons) is a key part in that.
What's better: being on your work computer for 14 hrs/day producing nothing of value and/or taking meetings that you're at best a passive observer in, or being on your work computer for 3 hrs/day hitting and exceeding personal/team goals and driving tons of value and spending the remaining 5 work hours living life while being available?
I hope we can collectively move away from time-spent-working as the measure of productivity.
Is it that hard to whip out a mobile phone / tablet when you need to conduct some personal business or procrastinate?
This goes hand in hand with the more general principle of maintaining strict compartmentalization between work and personal life. My personal time, devices, online accounts, etc are mine.
I get the preference but the separation is pretty easy
I see this assumption that people are being sneaky by using company devices for private matters on HN quite frequently, but it really doesn't gel with my experience.
> I […] installed Asahi on my work Macbook for the simple reason that I don't want to do anything personal on the Mac OS partition
A laptop takes physical space that I am paying for, not the company, unless the company is paying some slim percentage of my rent.
Why does the company feel entitled to have me store its stuff? Theres a policy that you can't leave the laptop at the office.
I've seen security breaches happen, and it's not the self-motivated users who cause them. It's the casual users who leave their computer unlocked, or go on social media with the same one browser they're using for work, or who click links in email without checking the source.
this sounds like personal use, though. I do appreciate your perspective, and am sorry that your IT dept has no sense of security. Disallowing password managers and ad blockers honestly sounds like a good sign to gtfo and find a more competent org, or dig in and drive some serious change from the inside.
A proper corporate security is to never have a chance for some client device to compromise the security.
Asking "why do you feel entitled" is starting off on the wrong foot.
I think that’s the part I personally balk at a bit (and what I suspect GP was getting at), not necessarily the act of installing whatever you want on the device.
Mixing work and personal like that seems a priori a bad idea. In many cases, work can even seize your device from you for legal reasons. Yes, you can keep the personal activities separate on an encrypted partion and otherwise walled off from the work bits. But this all just limits some of the possible downsides and doesn’t make it a good idea.
Would you be comfortable letting Bob in Accounting use her own computer, the one she uses to do payroll for the whole company? The same Bob who clicks every link in every email and installs every executable possible. The same Bob who doesn't remember passwords and has the payroll system password on a post-it note next to his display and uses auto-login on his computer because typing the password every morning is too much of a hassle.
Or would you rather have some "corporate spyware" on there doing basic sanity checks for malware, weird access patterns, enforcing a password policy and automatic locking when idle?
The problem with these corporate spywares is that they're designed for the Bobs of the world and I do not consider myself a Bob. When my employer was implementing one of these management nannies to enforce password policies, it would've rejected my password because it didn't have a number in it. However, mine was significantly longer than the minimum, so my password has like 25% more entropy than the minimum mandated.
If my employer trusts me enough to let me set up new AWS environments and secure our production databases, maybe they could trust me to secure my work laptop too. Different courses for different horses.
I've been in situations where programmers are forced under the same rules as random office workers. Like no admin permissions on their own laptop. If you need to install something, you had to call IT and they'd give you an admin account that was active for 30 minutes or something.
It was extremely fun when I had to test multiple applications and had to do this process many times a day :D
If only managers would set goals, and let workers achieve them as best they can.
Managers don’t know how to set goals, and if they set goals, their managers might change or disavow or ignore the previously set goals.
I once argued with a toxic founder and he yelled, “You don’t even work 40 hours/week!” So I walked him through it — I arrived before he did, and he saw me leave because he seated himself at the exit.
When he had to grant me that I worked plenty of hours, then he yelled, “But you’re not ENGAGED!”
And on and on it goes. Same shit, different script.
(coincidentally, my work laptop, which I chose, belongs to the company but went straight from the manufacturer to my home and I installed the OS and everything myself, and no piece of proprietary software from the company lives in it. I know I'm incredibly lucky on this.)
> On September 5, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that a private company's decision to dismiss an employee, after monitoring and accessing his instant messages sent from the workplace, violated the employee's right to respect for private and family life
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/05/romanian-chat-me...
Just because it's their computer doesn't mean they can do anything.
I do not use my work computer for much outside of work... However, when traveling for work or other times I will 100% do personal things on my computer. Even though I'm devops/sysadmin and had admin rights to disable applications from accessing my macbooks webcam I knew they could override it at anytime they wanted. So I also purchased covers for the webcam & never trusted that I wasn't being spied on via microphone. But any company that does that stuff is just terrible and it's not the way to get the best out of your employees. I am much more likely to put in a lot of extra time outside of work if I can mix in my personal browsing with my work.