I disagree. In some cases they might be, but I know several people who dogfood on those devices without really understanding what this could entail.
If your company hands you a device, don't then aim the camera at your genitals.
If your device has Caffe Macs and Radar apps installed, don't point it at your junk.
If you used a device to go over OKR status in the morning, don't point it down your pants at night.
If your Photos app alternates between pictures of the whiteboard from your system architecture meeting, and snapshots of your tickly parts, take a moment to think if maybe there's a problem there.
I mean... should we cater so much to people that can't figure this out themselves?
However I have the same problem with the Photos app on my personal phone. Apple lacks a proper way to store the private-private stash of late-night consumption vs daytime photos. I never show photos on my iPhone to friends, I never lend it to children, despite carefully triaging photos into albums of my holidays vs memes vs photos of administrative papers vs… porn. They shouldn’t have been in the same app to start with.
In a twist of irony, if Apple employees dogfooded their porn stash a little more with their work iPhone, maybe they would have actually come up with a “Photovault” feature, which doesn’t mix the photos in the photostream, nor uploads them to the cloud, which lead the photo scanning scandal of last week.
It's not just for photographs taken south of the border, so to speak.
If you do anything on company property or time (including laptops and phones) that isn't 100% company work, it can get caught up in subpoenas, discovery and other miscellaneous legal proceedings that your employer may be a party to. This can land you in legal hot water even if these activities had nothing to do with your employer. Once the DA's got your files, they can charge you with anything you may have dug up even if it's not related to their primary inquiries. Your drug-fueled trips to burning man may not look so entertaining to the DA.
Further the California blanket IP ownership exemptions only apply to things you do on your own time and your own property. If you come up with a fun startup idea, and you write some notes down on your work laptop or text your buddy on your work phone, you should just assume it belongs to the company.
Anyways, for anyone who needs to hear it again, for the love of all that's good and holy do not take photos of your genitals with company property.
And if you work somewhere you're assigned a laptop and a phone, you can probably afford your own of each. If that's the case I highly recommend it. As an Apple employee, the corporate discounts are worth taking advantage of.
I see odd google searches in Chrome regularly when someone is screen sharing and typing a URL.
A programmer who does that is incompetent. More than using Incognito, I specifically require my employees on the first day to create several Chrome profiles, to deal with personal stuff. Not only does it avoid Facebook cookie mangling with work, it also helps avoid unrelated advertising during work, improves search relevance, autosuggest becomes actually useful… and you can use your personal profile for your house hunt and bar searches, keeping the bookmarks and all.
What company? I just want to make sure I never apply. A boss who nanomanages your Chrome profile habits sounds like a terrible supervisor.
Some people just are cunts about the freedoms they’re given, and because of employees like you, we end up with antiviruses on laptops and corporate firewalls that block Facebook.
Just because employees feel “micromanaged by a terrible supervisor” who asks to use a separate Chrome profile to not mix cookies with work.
And your response illustrates my point. You think the poor souls you manage are ungrateful "cunts" who should thank you for the "freedoms" given by their benevolent dictator.
Again, what company is this? If you're this proud of your leadership, go on record.
It's still pretty messed up that you exploded so quickly and thoroughly over a completely reasonable criticism.