from Hacker News

Does employer have to tell if they're spying on you through your work computer?

by hker on 10/11/23, 3:53 AM with 65 comments

• by dhx on 10/11/23, 4:57 AM

  > "If you’re working from home they can pick up audio and visual images of your private life."

  The jurisdiction of the authors of this article appears to be Victoria, Australia where it is illegal to record audio and visual images of someone's private conversations or private space at home[1] without a law enforcement reason. Similar applies to other jurisdictions of Australia. Aside from the obvious legal problem, I doubt businesses would want to deal with the potential liabilities of recording and storing footage of someone's kid running past a camera in the background of an employee's home without clothes on, or recording a private conversation an employee has with their lawyer relating to a family law matter.

  Many Australian organisations would also be reluctant to provide their own employee's access to video surveillance footage from cameras in public locations. There would generally only be a small handful of employee's with access to recorded footage. There is a significant possibility of misuse resulting in negative media attention and fines for the organisation. There is also a cost issue. The more an organisation records, the greater the chance they'll have to respond (at their own cost) to a law enforcement request or response to a court proceeding to reveal the footage.

  [1] Part 2, Surveillance Devices Act 1999, https://content.legislation.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2...

• by elromulous on 10/11/23, 4:11 AM

  Whether they legally have to tell you or not, it's good practice to assume they will spy on you. </tinfoil_hat>

• by retSava on 10/11/23, 5:12 AM

  Funny to see this today. I'm doing consulting for a customer, and have an account on their Outlook/Teams setup, while still being associated with another unrelated company. My own computer and equipment. Yesterday I received a bounce email from Outlook - my forwarded email could not be delivered since the recipient didn't exist. Thing is, I didn't forward anything, and there is a c-level guy in this small company that is close to that user but just a keyboard slip away.

  So I have to assume that for some reason that forwarded email was supposedly interesting and there's either a filter to forward, or they manually log in and forward what's interesting. Either way, getting it in my face is pretty off-putting.

  Thinking of forwarding that email and add "hey, your surveillance is misconfigured, but here it is anyway".

• by andersa on 10/11/23, 5:00 AM

  You guys get free work computers? I had to buy my own hardware for working remotely. Though that also means there's no crazy spyware on it or unnecessary bloat slowing it down. I might actually prefer this arrangement...

  Do the large companies usually let you do that at all?

• by kristopolous on 10/11/23, 4:34 AM

  I've been reading a 1988 text by Barbara Garson, "The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past" - it's a series of interviews about primitive bossware, metric tracking and computerized middle management that effects a robbing of personal agency and deskilling of labor through various means of minuscule tracking ... 1988. Taylorism is old and it's coming for you.

  The book is fine btw... Not the greatest but fairly prescient

• by oaiey on 10/11/23, 4:42 AM

  Ever wondered why c suites use their own hardware, separate accounts and do not participate in cooperate platforms like SharePoint?

  I think privacy (for different reasons) is a key part in that.

• by nunez on 10/11/23, 1:02 PM

  This monitoring software is so stupid.

  What's better: being on your work computer for 14 hrs/day producing nothing of value and/or taking meetings that you're at best a passive observer in, or being on your work computer for 3 hrs/day hitting and exceeding personal/team goals and driving tons of value and spending the remaining 5 work hours living life while being available?

  I hope we can collectively move away from time-spent-working as the measure of productivity.

• by pfisherman on 10/11/23, 5:09 AM

  Mixing personal and work business of the same machine is just bad data hygiene.

  Is it that hard to whip out a mobile phone / tablet when you need to conduct some personal business or procrastinate?

  This goes hand in hand with the more general principle of maintaining strict compartmentalization between work and personal life. My personal time, devices, online accounts, etc are mine.

• by mistyvales on 10/11/23, 4:31 AM

  I actually installed Asahi on my work Macbook for the simple reason that I don't want to do anything personal on the Mac OS partition..

• by EarthAmbassador on 10/11/23, 4:26 AM

  There is no better way to destroy employee morale than to spy on them.

  If only managers would set goals, and let workers achieve them as best they can.

• by asdefghyk on 10/11/23, 4:05 AM

  My employer said they may or may not be monitoring our usage of the companies assets.

• by chmod600 on 10/11/23, 4:37 AM

  "Your work computer" is (mostly) an oxymoron. If you didn't buy it, its their computer.

• by blairanderson on 10/11/23, 4:20 AM

  No they don't have to tell you. It is their computer.