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Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty understandable. My last job was in ad tech, and as part of the employment agreement, we effectively signed away our privacy rights through a clause that effectively waived the privacy rights on any machine that interfaced with any thing related to the company. Problem was - how does someone make the distinction between viewing an ad for work purposes and viewing it for work? Not to mention the company gave very reasonable incentives to use your own phone for work, etc.

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Don't use your own equipment for work then. It's your employer's responsibility to provide the resources needed for your job, not yours.

Well, yes, but sometimes it's not that simple. For example, when the oncall person is unavailable and you get an emergency work call and only have your personal laptop on you.

It is that simple, though. Your management structure needs a better on-call strategy. Or needs to both compensate you for, and indemnify you for the use of, your personal gear.

I don't work there anymore, but I'm genuinely curious why you think that's simple. In theory, absolutely. In practice, though? Trust me - I tried to get a better on-call strategy. You're making a lot of assumptions there without knowing much about the company, their management structure, etc etc etc.

Why is it simple? Because you should never, ever need to use personal equipment or other resources for work use. If you're on-call, then the company should be providing the equipment needed to do those on-call duties, and pay for phone and internet charges accrued. If you're needing to use your personal stuff, then there's a problem, and the first thing to do would be to communicate this to your boss, and get the necessary equipment provisioned, be it a laptop to take back, or something else. Implicit reliance on your kit isn't even in the company's interest--what if it broke down, infected a customer with a virus or whatever. They and/or you might bear some liability for inability to provide service or to provide a bad service.

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