A gal I know was called in by her boss awhile back. “What’s this nassdack you’re looking at?” the boss demanded. “Huh?” my friend responded.
“What’s this nassdack you’re looking at?” the boss repeated.
Turned out my friend was taking quick peeks at Nasdaq quotes, and her boss was spying on her.
Stupid boss.
Big Brother has a keyboard beneath your fingers.
Hint for office workers - get a cell phone for personal communications and web use. (And use the cell connection, not the office wi-fi.) Anyone stupid enough to use the work computer to view porn should be fired for stupidity. (I knew a lawyer that did that, and did get fired).
If you are on company time, you should be working.
We know this monitoring is NEVER done to government employees. Washington DC has the laziest, overpaid woke hacks, and can never be fired. So when they aren’t monitoring conservatives they are watching porn on their company computers, all day long.
Looking at you FBI hacks. /spit
If your employer does this, it is a good sign that you need to find another job. Bosses who micromanage are productivity killers.
I’ve also heard stories of employees holding multiple positions with multiple employers simultaneously.
Devastating lack of trust all around.
Bfl
Assume that everything connected to the corporate network is spying on you. My take-home laptop from work has crowdstrike software on it.
We even have cameras watching us at work, not hidden cameras, visible cameras.
I work in a plating factory. They had cameras all over the place watching us.
The company I work for has everything Lojack’d out the a$$.
My work truck, trailer, mini-ex, computer, and work phone is GPS tracked. On top of all that we have nanny cams in the vehicles that grade us on our driving.
Had an electrician rewiring my house. I came in one day and heard him talking. Thought he was talking to his helper. Not the case. He was on his cell phone. Helper meanwhile made mistakes. Fired his butt.
I judge my teams by their results. If you meet or exceed the need, and you happen to do it at home while taking a few moments to pick up the kids or with some slack to spare, especially since you’re not spending 2 hours a day driving, dressing up, parking, etc, cool. All the good folks do as needed outside the normal schedule, and it’s comped back in.
The bad ones hardly need watching either; poor work or late and now our team has to have more checkpoint meets, and someone has to double-check that work; and if it doesn’t improve, problems happen.
I don’t need to spy on people to know this. They’re adults; if there’s a problem they can bring it forward and we’ll resolve it. It’s when they don’t act like adults and hide stuff like bad 5 year olds that bad things happen. If they’re excelling what do I care if they’re reading FR on their cell while on that Teams call?
Obviously the work machine has to be for work only. Never mind ‘use of company property’ which is true anyway — the wolves are at the door phishing and scamming etc. Dinking around with other stuff on the work machine is asking for a catastrophic data breach, loss of IP, failure of projects, PII or FTI out in the while and end to careers + the lives of those whose identity is stolen when data is lost.
Can we monitor politicians like this?
In the late 90’s I was a director of a small group of guys who installed internet access for out company. “Everyone gets access from their desktop PC!” This was before hardware routers were economical (There were Wellfleet models, but they were big money). So we used a PC running some proxy-like software that provided a basic firewall, and NATing of addresses. It also provided a single access point to the net, and featured logging. We logged everything, and one of the inside sales guys would spend all day surfing porn. We went to him and told him “Dude, everything you do on the internet is logged. If you’re doing anything that you shouldn’t, knock it off”. A week later we checked the logs, porn. All day, every day. We went to his boss, and told him what was going on. Boss called him in, told him “Rick, they log EVERYTHING. Knock it off!” 2 weeks later we check, all porn, all day. We print out his log for the last 2 weeks, 170+ pages of misskitty dot com, and give it to his manager. Manager calls him in, he denies it. Manager pulls out the logs and starts reading them to him. He denies it all, he gets fired. Strangely after he left, there were no more visits to misskitty dot com.
while WFH, my work laptop sat next to my personal PC, i worked on the work machine...
also don’t friend the boss
years ago a receptionist forgot she friended the office manager, so when she posted herself playing hooky, the next day, well the next day was fun to watch...
No. Ctrl-Alt-Delete
My company wants us to sign in and out using our own phones. A group of us refused and were given company tablets.
Then the company was acquired by a bigger fish, changed the sign in/sign out software to a different package, then disabled the new package on our tablets.
I am still refusing to install the package on my phone. It gets terrible reviews from users and reduces the performance of your phone. Even messed up one colleague’s glucose monitoring app. Drains the battery transmitting GPS. Takes ten minutes to clock in. Have to keep logging out and back in, according to users.
And I don’t want no stinking company GPS on my phone. They say it doesn’t monitor anything when you aren’t clocked in. Yeah. I trust that.
Still fighting lonely battle, unresponsive IT dept citing company policy, supervisor on my side but has other things to do. Still not using it.
Don’t use your company computer for anything but business. Use your phone or your own computer for personal things.
I had coworkers who used Microsoft Teams Chat feature. We had different ones for the help desk dept I was in. One for east coast and one for west coast. There was a main one that everyone could see.
The manager was lucky he did not see the west coast one as we had several people making remarks about them that would get those employees fired. New management took over and created yet another channel and the talk continued “privately” on the west coast one. The thing is if some manager wanted to see what John Smith was saying it would show all comments on every chat.
Funny story of the old old days. My grandfather started a business in 1908 and the deliveries were done by horse drawn wagon. One day he took over a route when that driver was out and the horse knew the route.
It made stop after stop including a bar that was not a customer....