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

&gt; &quot;If you’re working from home they can pick up audio and visual images of your private life.&quot;<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s kid running past a camera in the background of an employee&#x27;s home without clothes on, or recording a private conversation an employee has with their lawyer relating to a family law matter.<p>Many Australian organisations would also be reluctant to provide their own employee&#x27;s access to video surveillance footage from cameras in public locations. There would generally only be a small handful of employee&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to respond (at their own cost) to a law enforcement request or response to a court proceeding to reveal the footage.<p>[1] Part 2, Surveillance Devices Act 1999, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.legislation.vic.gov.au&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;2021-12&#x2F;99-21aa042%20authorised.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.legislation.vic.gov.au&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;2...</a>

Whether they legally have to tell you or not, it&#x27;s good practice to assume they will spy on you. &lt;&#x2F;tinfoil_hat&gt;

Funny to see this today. I&#x27;m doing consulting for a customer, and have an account on their Outlook&#x2F;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&#x27;t exist. Thing is, I didn&#x27;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.<p>So I have to assume that for some reason that forwarded email was supposedly interesting and there&#x27;s either a filter to forward, or they manually log in and forward what&#x27;s interesting. Either way, getting it in my face is pretty off-putting.<p>Thinking of forwarding that email and add &quot;hey, your surveillance is misconfigured, but here it is anyway&quot;.

You guys get free work computers? I had to buy my own hardware for working remotely. Though that also means there&#x27;s no crazy spyware on it or unnecessary bloat slowing it down. I might actually prefer this arrangement...<p>Do the large companies usually let you do that at all?

I&#x27;ve been reading a 1988 text by Barbara Garson, &quot;The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past&quot; - it&#x27;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&#x27;s coming for you.<p>The book is fine btw... Not the greatest but fairly prescient

Ever wondered why c suites use their own hardware, separate accounts and do not participate in cooperate platforms like SharePoint?<p>I think privacy (for different reasons) is a key part in that.

This monitoring software is so stupid.<p>What&#x27;s better: being on your work computer for 14 hrs&#x2F;day producing nothing of value and&#x2F;or taking meetings that you&#x27;re at best a passive observer in, or being on your work computer for 3 hrs&#x2F;day hitting and exceeding personal&#x2F;team goals and driving tons of value and spending the remaining 5 work hours living life while being available?<p>I hope we can collectively move away from time-spent-working as the measure of productivity.

Mixing personal and work business of the same machine is just bad data hygiene.<p>Is it that hard to whip out a mobile phone &#x2F; tablet when you need to conduct some personal business or procrastinate?<p>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.

I actually installed Asahi on my work Macbook for the simple reason that I don&#x27;t want to do anything personal on the Mac OS partition..

There is no better way to destroy employee morale than to spy on them.<p>If only managers would set goals, and let workers achieve them as best they can.

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

&quot;Your work computer&quot; is (mostly) an oxymoron. If you didn&#x27;t buy it, its <i>their</i> computer.

No they don&#x27;t have to tell you. It is their computer.