Ask HN: Why shouldn’t I use corporate devices for personal use? I currently work for a big tech co, I have done so for a few years. At this point I have a Phone, table and Macbook from work. I use all three on my own time, and don’t have any personal equivalents other than a shared desktop with my partner where I store things like films and music library. I’m becoming increasingly conscious of the consequences of this, so HN, why shouldn’t I? |
Speaking of getting terminated, if you have all your personal contacts, messages, maybe some photo's and other things on the phone and they decide one day they are going to terminate you they can require you turn in the devices with no time to remove any personal information. They can (and will win even in court if you challenge it) ask you for the passcode to review everything on the phone, laptop etc. Nothing you do on those devices is private, protected (for you) or your own property.
I worked for years in charge of a department where we managed all the IT devices, we would consistently find pictures of peoples naked spouses on their work devices, find mortgage information, bank accounts, pin numbers, you name it we saw it. I can't stress it enough, if you are issued a device from a company it is not yours to use personally. I will say, usually when we found these things we politely reminded the employee to remove them. If the person was being terminated or was under investigation we would generally dispose of these items once the investigation was complete and actions were defined. That also meant generally a few people would see these things (as few as absolutely necessary) but the employee rarely ever got them.
I also had an employee who knew he was being laid off one time decide to wipe his work laptop to prevent us from seeing what he was doing. Frankly we already knew much of it, but when he wiped his machine he caused monetary damage to the company because he also wiped a number of keys (and source code) which he created but had never properly handed off to his managers (or checked in) and it cost the company months of time and significant sums of money, not to mention lost productivity, to find and resolve all the issues. Frankly he could have been charged with a crime and/or sued for damages if the founders would've pursued him.
*edit: sentence fixed
If you use company hardware to work on your own projects, you're muddying who now owns those projects.
When I worked on prior versions of PhotoStructure while employed by other companies, I always did so on my own time, hardware and services. I also made sure PhotoStructure was in my employment contract, specified as a "prior invention" owned only by me.
- get sued
- have your hard personal work and records that are stored on the devices deleted or read whenever they want
- keyloggers so they’ll know your passwords
- everything is logged
- ALL web traffic, no https - all of it is logged, decrypted and reencrypted
- anything you type in is liable to be keylogged