Never do anything on work machines/networks you don’t want to have to explain to hr/legal.
Also do some really weird things that are innocuous so the HR lady looks at you weird from now on.
Examples please?
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Reload every five seconds the global doomsday countdown clock.
Absolutely. Everyone could use that reminder
Everybody has a cell phone nowadays. There’s no excuse not to use your cell phone for private stuff. In fact don’t use the company Wi-Fi. You must use the company Wi-Fi then you must use a VPN
But no excuse anymore not to use your phone, you don’t need to use the word computer to browse, send emails, flirt, whatever
All of my colleagues have work provided phones and laptops. They do all their personal shit on these devices (they don’t have their own)
They think i’m a huge weirdo for having my own personal devices… “Why waste money? Work gives us computer/phone… Lol, yoi carry two phones like a drug dealer?”
Then they have nobody to blame but themselves when drama happens.
IT: “You’ve been fired. Please return your laptop…”
“But how do i retrieve all my personal files?”
IT: [Shrug emoji]
Like IT gives you any time to get anything off a corporate-owned device.
When I got laid off, IT sent a bullet to my laptop immediately kicking me off and completely locking me out of it.
I was supposed to have another 4 days to transition my work. I contacted IT and was told once the bullet goes out, that’s it. Any and all access to everything has been terminated. Might as well just go home and enjoy the extra 4 days because no one’s going to undo a bullet going off early unless it comes from the C-suite. So I did.
@EmbeddedEntropy @9488fcea02a9 Okay. Note fur future me: BACKUP🙃
Just tell them “I don’t want to spend company’s resources for my own private life.”
The only way is to give them back that guilt and fear they are feeling.
it’s one thing if they pay for them but if they are actually company devices that’s fucking weird
Nope. It’s not a pay and reimburse situation
Pure company owned devices
WTF? What country? Even at jobs where I was given a phone no one felt like ditching their personal devices.
I suspect its a millenial thing…
A few of us old guys keep personal devices… Our young colleages just expect the company to provide devices for them and never have to buy their own
Or we can’t afford our own 😕.
personal
Decent used laptops are quite affordable. I recently scored one on Ebay for under $100. It runs Linux and everything is snappy.
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Don’t most work Wifi networks prevent VPM use?
This has not been my experience
then spin up your own wireguard instance and connect to it?
Use Tailscale. Much easier to configure and manage than raw WireGuard.
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Mine does. They also keep an eye on it because I had gotten through it and that only worked a few days before it was blocked too. Didn’t want to press my luck after that.
where the hell do you work dude
No.
You must use the company Wi-Fi then you must use a VPN
The company VPN or the client VPN, sadly
I mean if your personal device is attached to a work network use a always on personal VPN.
If you can’t for whatever reason then don’t connect to the wifi!
Of course they can, they literally own the machine. You don’t own it, so don’t treat it like it’s your own private job hunting platform or porn viewer.
Yea, this regular “surprise” that work computers are… IDK… owned by work and are configured as the owner requires… is so strange to me.
Your work can also read your private Slack messages. You have been warned.
Are they really called private messages? They should just be direct messages
I was the slack admin. We could not see private messages of clients. We could see company wide channels.
If I remember correctly you have to pay extra to be able to access private messages. Maybe you didn’t have this option enabled?
They can see it. I know because someone had an HR investigation happening and they showed me screenshots of his Slack conversations.
If it was a screenshot then they didn’t get it from slack. They have spyware that takes screenshots.
Obviously if they install malware that records keystrokes or the screen then they can see what you type and what’s on your screen.
But slack doesn’t let admins export private chats
Then they must have been able to capture his whole screen. Idk how they’d do that days later, but they had a screenshot of a private conversation in slack. Maybe he had already set off some flags before then and they were watching him or something.
I used TOR at work once, to download some RPMs. Corp IT had a fucking meltdown
I can’t imagine why
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i think they are a package of some distribution.
like .deb for Ubuntu or .exe for windows.
RedHat Package Manager
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Actually it’s Raunchy Porn Movies
We’re not cool enough to know
I worked in security and trained all our staff on how to use Tor. Good data hygiene is important around the office.
Also Onion Share is the best way to securely share large sensitive files between users
Hmm, no Onionshare is for anonymity, Wormhole or Syncthing are good for security, anything AES basically. You are simply using random Tor servers to share files withing a company…
Why would you download RPMs from a browser, to a work PC, and do they use RHEL?
Some of our servers used RHEL, and were airgapped, so I had to use TOR because they blocked the site (rpm.pbone I think)and then sneakernet that shit.
Until you get asked by HR why you’re breaking their policies by clearing history and why you’re doing it. If it’s a work device that’s not yours, don’t expect privacy. It’s their property.
They don’t need the computer to see everywhere you’ve gone. I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for clearing their history, but lots of people who have had problems visiting questionable sites.
You underestimate just how dumb some corporate policies are lol. Even if you are completely right.
When I turn on my pc I get a prompt saying “this computer is managed by your organization, expect no privacy”
That’s not how it works in civilized countries that provide worker’s rights by law
I have a very hard time believing that lol. Doesn’t matter what country, it’s still the companies property, and the work you’re doing in it is still considered their property. It’s not a personal device. What a pretentious statement.
In Canada employees may have a limited expectation of privacy on work computers.
Quoting from this article, which references the same supreme court case as the above article:
Mr. Justice Fish, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, delineated the following instructive principles:
- Whether at home or in the workplace, computers are reasonably used for personal purpose and contain information that is meaningful, intimate and touching on the user’s biographical core;
- The user may reasonably expect privacy in the information contained on their computer particularly where personal use is permitted or reasonably expected;
- While ownership of the computer and workplace policies are relevant considerations, neither is determinative of a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy;
- The totality of all the circumstances will need to be considered to determine whether privacy is a reasonable expectation in any particular case;
- Workplace policies and practices may diminish an individual’s expectation of privacy in a work computer; however they may not in themselves remove the expectation entirely;
- A reasonable, though diminished expectation of privacy, is nonetheless a reasonable expectation of privacy, protected by s. 8 of the Charter and subject only to state intrusion under the authority of a reasonable law.
Accidentally deleted my post lol, but the court case ultimately ruled for the company, and that these laws aren’t very strong to begin with.
It is recommended that employers should implement clear policies that define, in unequivocal terms, the employer’s expectations surrounding workplace computer use, including smartphone use, if employers provide such equipment to employees in an employment context. Although Fish J., in R. v. Cole, stated that workplace policies are not determinative of a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy, if properly drafted a workplace policy combined with consistent employer actions in the workplace, may diminish, objectively, the employee’s reasonable expectation of privacy. For example, where both the employer’s workplace policy and the employer’s actions in the workplace are consistent in prohibiting any personal use by employees of employer-issued computers or smartphones and where the employee has acknowledge receipt of employer’s policy that provides that any data sent, stored or received using the employer’s computer or smartphone is the property of the employer and the employer reserves the right to perform random checks or audits of the employee’s computer or smartphone use, the employee may be hard pressed to argue that he or she has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
And the article you linked still suggests it’s a bad idea to assume privacy.
While it may be tempting to use an instant chat application for workplace gossip, it is best to follow the golden rule: if you wouldn’t share it with your boss voluntarily, it’s probably best saved for a face-to-face conversation.
This is more so to protect employees who are browsing facebook or something on a personal computer, that the employeer isn’t then allowed to snoop on their private social media accounts. For work related stuff, the rule still applies that it’s work property.
Unfortunately, words on paper frequently fail to prevent organizations, public of private, from doing things they are technically not allowed to do. See the security state apparatus of any of the nations around the world including the 5, 9 and 14 eyes, or any number of tech companies that claim and market privacy respective policies only for people to uncover later that what they pitch publicly diverges in spirit from what they do or what is in the actual terms of service.
Hopefully if people find their employer going outside the bounds of the contract they can catch it, catalog it and hold them to account. Accountability can often be tricky and costly though.
So… not the United States. France, maybe? Germany?
Sadly this.
Any personal matters I may have attended to during work hours were done on a personal device, through a VPN, preferably borrowing some other WiFi signal than one run by any company I work for.
If its even more personal, just drop WiFi I don’t control all together. Either use the phones data plan for 10 minutes, or tether it to a computer and do the same.
I work in cybersec - I’m not going to speak for all businesses or individuals but I will give you my perspective.
Sometimes we need to see browser history to help with timeline correlation, it’s mainly to see “how did this file get here, was it downloaded etc.
Sometimes the investigators need to check out the things they need to check out, BUT
BUT
It needs to be done precisely and sparingly where needed only. This means instead of going through the entire history file, or doing unrelated correlation work (spying on you without cause) you are going to only grab specific timeframes from things you suspect explicitly to prevent any overreach. It’s a tricky balance to hold but also why it’s so important for people in tech to be privacy advocates as well.
There’s a difference between searching for answers to a problem that arose and looking for/predicting problems (thought crime detected!)
I also work in cybersecurity. Second everything this person said.
This thread is a good reminder, because at many organizations HR / management can and will look at your browser history (and computer activity in general) as a method of monitoring performance and staying in control.
But at my organization, we have never once looked at anyone’s browser history (and I know that HR hasn’t because they would have to go through us). We certainly could if we were asked to and we would if there was an incident (what we would care about is sensitive / confidential information getting leaked or suspicious activity on the network using a specific person’s credentials, suggesting those credentials may be compromised). But in almost 2 years (we’re a startup in the aerospace electronics sector) we have never once had cause to do that and we have a philosophy that happy relaxed employees who feel trusted by their employer are the kinds of employees that we want, so we wouldn’t intrude that way without cause ever.
I third(?) this. Security and IT teams are too busy to be monitoring your everyday habits. Sure, they can see your history if they wanted to, but they won’t unless there is an appropriate justification to do so, and it’s usually triggered by an incident or HR. There also stricit rules with doing so because employees still have the right to their own privacy. It’s not like HR can just go over to the security guy and ask them to pull someone’s browsing history.
Same for our company, and all companies whose security folks I’ve had a chat with. We don’t give a fuck what you do on your computer. Almost all security folks are into privacy themselves, additionally to simply not having the time to look at people’s browser history or traffic or whatever.
Yes, we have the option to collect data. No, we don’t look at it unless there is a very good reason to do so. And we protect that data, HR or whoever can’t just have it if they feel like taking a look. There is a process to protect the data, because that means protecting the company.
Your security team is not the enemy.
I agree with you completely
your work sees all your browser history
Possibly, if they’ve bothered to configure their machines that way. And only on the browsers they’ve configured that way and only on their machines.
Also, please don’t assume that your work operates the same way as everyone else’s work.
We have that capability but dont really have the time or need for it. having said that, it only takes one rouge employee to mess it up for everyone else.
it only takes one rouge employee
What about a pink employee?
Sir, that is not an employee. That is a pig.
They were tickled?
Oh no, my employer might find out I’m looking for other jobs after being overloaded for a year and a half and constantly having my concerns/feedback/process improvement initiatives brushed aside.
I have been hinting to my manager for 6-9 months that he needs to move part of my workload elsewhere so that I can focus and actually achieve something. To think, all it took was for me to tell him straight that I was unhappy and unfulfilled to the point that I was considering resigning. Suddenly he’s all apologies and let’s make changes because you’re kind of vital and we don’t want to lose you.
And I was fired for it. Depends on the market demand I suppose, some industries there is no denying your worth, in others you’re disposable.
I love the fact that firing me what the person you’re answering mentioned is illegal here.
Peace of mind.
I’m an infrastructure analyst and at my workplace I implement such rules for specific reasons: 1) we need to be able to have evidence should an employee act maliciously with a company device. We do also monitor all queries but it’s passive. We can drill into your browsing history in great detail but won’t unless we have to (speaking personally here as I follow the code). 2) people will do dumb shit. And will lie to get support. Now, having been on the other end of a support ticket, I get it. Unless you lie a little, you may not get support promptly. Therefore, it’s part of my job to check what’s the lie and what’s the actual issue, which includes being able to see the download history. I would not be surprised if malware is accidentally downloaded and then it autonomously removes itself from the download history as It has happened before. Strictly speaking, this is done for both your safety as well as that of the company. And generally speaking, you should NEVER use your work laptop/phone/iPad for personal use because of all of the above.
I use my personal laptop at work, no issues. Employer can’t see what I’m doing which is the way it should be.
If they don’t trust me, don’t hire me then.
I would never work anywhere where people like you can watch what I’m doing. Luckily I’m in IT so I choose where I work.
I despise companies who don’t give employees privacy. The reasons you gave means nothing. You can always argue for anything to protect the company. Who protects the employees?
Safest for the company would be if you have employees in small cells being watched by guards around the clock. That would be really good for the company.
If you’ve connected your personal laptop to your work wifi, they 100% can see all your browsing history (specifically whats passed through their network).
Hell, I only run a simple homelab and I can see the exact traffic/browsing history of every device on my home network. I’m only tracking via dns traffic, but your https traffic can even be intercepted and decrypted pretty easily. So don’t even trust that.
This doesn’t require installing anything on your device to fully monitor you.
You’re not wrong. It really comes down to how ethical the IT/company is. And we are, purposely so. Also we have dns-over-https and No other identifier is parsed through. So we can see and block someone browsing porn on the guest Wi-Fi, but we’d never know who it was. Look, I’m not saying things are perfect, but there are people like me who look out for both the user and the company. The goal is ensure that users privacy is respected and that the company is protected agains misuse, malicious intent or just plain bad-luck. This is the “code” I was referring to. As IT people we have to behave ethically for business we operate in. It’s not perfect but nobody is trying to be. This is all best effort from all parties.
Your ethics goes out the window when being told to do something by your employer.
Maybe you try to look out for the user, but it’s completely wrong that employees should have to trust you to do that.
“Company being protected from misuse” is a blanket term for survellience, same as “fighting terrorism”.
I still stand by my opinion. Companies need to trust employees and not run survellience programs against them. It’s just wrong.
Sure but I work from home. Don’t use their wifi except when I’m in the office. I could connect to a VPN and they would also see a connection to a VPN, but I don’t care enough to do that.
But when I’m at home, working on my computer, they don’t see anything.
I hear you, and fully get where you’re coming from. I work in the finance industry and we have auditors to answer to as well as a ridiculous number of compliance regulations we have to abide by. Not every business is the same. I’m personally on the no-trust policy when you have more than 50 users to manage but it also depend on company policy. No one is saying you can’t use your personal device at work. We don’t monitor the guest Wi-Fi in any way specifically because that would be an invasion of privacy. I was referring specifically to using a work device, managed by the business, for personal use. The employee is protected by being briefed during first day induction of he does and don’t with regards to the equipment that is provided to them to do their job. Their personal privacy is not infringed upon as there is a clear agreement about what is expected from them. By the way, I’m in the uk (not sure if relevant).
No. The way it should be is using a work-issue laptop at work, but provisioned by you.
So only watch mainstream porn on work computers, got it.
I’ve always assumed work will be looking at the browser history. Anyone who assumes they won’t is an idiot.
Softcore is expressly permitted in the IT policy.
Anyone know exactly what they could see if you’re on a personal device but work-wifi?
Usually the websites and apps you use, but not what specific page you visit and it’s content.
If you for example visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States they could see that you visited https://en.wikipedia.org/ but nothing more.
This is assuming that the website is encrypted (it starts with https://, not http://), which nowadays luckily most websites are. Otherwise they can see the specific page, it’s content and most likely also all information you input on that page.
My work runs MITM with corporate certificates, so they can see everything no matter whether it’s encrypted or not. If you don’t accept the certificates to let them monitor, you can’t browse.
Therefore, I just don’t use it.
Is that for the VPN, or actually all wifi connections? Not sure how it would be possible for wifi
Corporate networks (especially those utilizing MITM) block vpn access altogether.
You can’t reach your vpn server, falling back to plain un-tunneled https. Then instead of dns retuning the true ip, it returns a local corporate ip; you connect to that with https and it serves you a cert generated on the fly for that particular domain signed by a root cert your browser already trusts. Your browser sees nothing wrong and transmits via that compromised connection.
You can usually check for this by connecting via mobile data, taking a screenshot of the cert details, then doing the same on work wifi and compare.
If the cert details change on wifi, your traffic is being intercepted, decrypted, read/logged, then re-encrypted and passed to the server you’re trying to reach.
I was talking about work VPN, the thing I connect to every morning to access work’s internal services.
I don’t see how a 3rd party device connecting to wifi can have https MITM. Otherwise many wifi out there would do it and steal your info.
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Can you link to something with more info on how it works? I know how certs work and CAs but not how some random wifi network can hijack that whole trust system. It sounds like it would defeat the whole purpose of https. Thanks in advance.
I see, thanks
Every URL visited minimum unless you are going to an encrypted VPN outside their network first, then they will still see the network traffic to that vpn . I Know someone that got caught redditing on work wifi. granted they also had their device name set to use their name in it… so some of that is on them
Not every URL, just every domain.
That’ll also depend on whether you’re on a personal device that’s using DoH (DNS over HTTPS). Which most phones do by default now. If you haven’t disabled that then they’ll only know IP addresses which are often not actually owned by or even unique to specific websites these days.
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I’m on Ubuntu at work! The only employee on Linux at a tech company of >150 people! (Where are my Linux nerds?)
Kind of yeah, the rest of the working world uses Windows for good reasons.
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Legacy software with incredible backwards compatibility, exponetially more software options, user familiarity, pretty much everything that active directory provides from user management to group policies, the list goes on.
Im a linux guy, but the thought of rolling out even the most user friendly linux distro gives me nightmares.
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I’m in a company that uses Microsoft stuff, but I use a lot of fedora and Linux mint in VMs. The latter is based off Ubuntu at least!
It’s actually kind of nice to be able to save the state of my VM since forced restarts are so infrequent.
Joke’s on you, I’m the network admin in the office.
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Trust an IT guy, we all do linux shit for fun. But at the office it’s called “work”. You are qualified.
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Arch on work is called centOS or debian. Just a hint for your new job.
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