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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Is it, though? I genuinely don’t think so. Performance stuff like this is usually documented via your HR stuff, the PIP etc.

“This guy was browsing incel forums from this time to this time”

Which court in what land uses that information?

Sounds kind of mythical, especially since I’m sure there’s an army of other people on idiot forums like that who are nonetheless performing fine.

EDIT: Okay, you guys hit me with sufficient downvotes that I’m rate limited so I know the predominant view is different.

Fine. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you this. If some rando IT dude is going through folks’ computers after they quit and I find out, I am quitting your company and telling everyone. I have never done that to anyone reporting to me and no company has ever done that to me. I can’t believe you’d accept these work conditions. Wild.

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It makes sense if you think you're likely to have to defend the decision in court. For instance, I've worked on a team where a guy was fired for performance reasons that were obvious to all of us, but he sued and claimed it was discrimination. HR had known of a performance problem and the process was documented, but if the trustworthiness of the manager who gave them all that information is cast in doubt, could they really defend it quickly and decisively in court? We all had to be deposed. Imagine if it became a lengthy court case. I imagine it would be nice for the company to have a paper trail of convincing evidence of a performance problem. A timeline of significant, non-work web browsing during work hours on work machines would do the trick, and protect the rest of the team and the company.

That said, I agree with the commenters that I wouldn't want to work somewhere that did this as a matter of routine. I always have my work laptop encrypted with a key only I know and I have not (yet) been forced to give work root access for management. I'm always confident handing in my laptop that they couldn't find anything even if there was something.

>Fine. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you this. If some rando IT dude is going through folks’ computers after they quit and I find out, I am quitting your company and telling everyone. I have never done that to anyone reporting to me and no company has ever done that to me. I can’t believe you’d accept these work conditions. Wild.

Every large company I've worked at or heard of it's pretty much assumed that IT may monitor everything you do on their machine. Everyone knew this. Which is why you don't use the company laptop for personal use.

Is it same in EU? If I read the law correctly I understood they need a good reason to monitor and they definitely need to notify you and ask for consent.

I have been using my work laptop quite heavily for personal use and I would prefer not to stop honestly.

I believe my intentions are pure and to provide value, I understand world is not perfect, but I would not want to work for an employer that needed to monitor me.

IANAL, but as far as I read into the situation, employee monitoring is a very dangerous field. There are exceptions, however, such as company-provided http(s) proxies and more concrete monitoring or investigation when suspicion arises (I know of two cases where employees were suspected of consuming child porn and they were both monitored as well as having their hardware seized).

Lastly, the companies or specific malicious admins might simply not care about the legality and still monitor you - either for company reasons or simply to stir through your data. If they have admin access to your computer, it's simply not your computer.

IT may have the legal right and often the technical ability to monitor any activity on work computers.

But it is stupid to allow any old IT staff to do so, and this thread is a good illustration of why: because most IT staff do not have the discipline or smarts to keep what they learn sufficiently confidential. Allowing IT staff to browse the files of other staff at will can lead to other HR problems such as harassment or even blackmail, or loss of corporate reputation if people post embarrassing stuff in, say, a public HN thread.

The ability should be exercised only under the supervision of a lawyer, which limits bad behavior and creates attorney-client privilege for discussions of what might be found.

This can be a double edged sword though.

I worked at a place that did have good 'secrecy' around most monitoring. While I was one of three people outside of Infosec that managed to find out that someone was let go because they were caught exfiltrating client/employee PIFI... I'm pretty sure nobody who was possibly compromised got informed.

This was a place that was so concerned with image that the handbook was about as strict as what my Sister had to deal with when teaching at a Catholic school. Image was everything to them.

"This guy was stealing company data"

"This guy was conducting illegal business using the company's network"

"This guy was running his own mining rig on company servers"

It's not hard to think of actual cases that happen.

Sure, but fortunately we’re not context-free text generators. We are able to see that we are in a thread where the guy was let go for poor performance. Like that shit is not “poor performance”.

Y’all are playing me if you think that.

If someone is that bad that they run mining rigs on your servers, I suspect a little personal web use is the least of your worries :)

> Is it, though? I genuinely don’t think so.

Are you a lawyer?

> Which court in what land uses that information?

That seems like a question for the legal department, not for the IT department.

You're doing this thing that smart people do (I know because I do it myself if I'm not careful) where you way overstep your area of expertise. It's not a good look, avoid the trap.

EDIT: You've changed your stance from a general stance to a specifically ethical stance here, and I agree: it would be better if employers respected the privacy of their employees more.

However, that's just not the world we live in. From the perspective of an employer, you can make your choice to behave ethically regardless of the legal implications, and that's a choice that I would laud you for. But from the perspective of an employee, you shouldn't assume that your employer will behave ethically: on the contrary, I would always assume that your employer is going to go through your computer when you give it back. You can fight that if you want, but that's not the hill I would choose to die on, as there are much worse privacy violations going on.

If you want to see how bad things have gotten, freeze your credit, sign up for credit monitoring, and then start applying for jobs, and see what happens. About 75% of jobs I've applied for in the last few years have tried to pull credit reports--and you can't really stop them as long as they do a "soft" credit check (freezing credit doesn't block this).

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