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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

> do not log in or access any of your personal services on work computers.

It baffles me whenever I see someone’s personal email open on a work machine. Seems like that’s putting a lot of unwarranted trust in your employer.

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Thought experiment, what is the worst thing the employer could do, assuming a 2fa email setup?

Would it be “just” learning the password and making a screenshot of the inbox and any open emails, or is it relatively easy to look at more?

Edit: right, also any email that gets written.

The risk isn't that much that your employer gaining access to your email (though you may potentially be risking the contents of emails that you view from that machine getting saved and accessed by someone at the company). It's more that you've legally entangled things. If your employer is sued or investigated, a judge can issue a subpoena for them to turn over records. If those records show that employees accessed external accounts from work systems, now they can get a subpoena to access those accounts and any other devices that have accessed those. I've seen this happen to friends. Employer gets sued and as part of discovery, they had to hand over all of their personal devices because they hadn't kept church and state separate. Took them many months and significant legal expenses to get their stuff back. If you never access personal stuff from your work devices and never access work stuff from your personal devices, you'll never be in that position.

2FA only protects login. If you're already logged in, someone with access to the computer can just copy the session token. Or instruct the email client that is already running to dump all your emails to a local file.

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