Would You Work For A Firm That Did This?

[ToraToraTora]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59152864
....well it would be easy just to just use another PC for personal stuff but that's not the point.

[pastafreak]

It says that "They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations."
I'm a bit amazed a company could ask...demand?... that personal equipment could be connected to office machines. Why would no one query that?
And no, I'd certainly not work willingly for a company that did that.

[chelle7272]

No I would not. Like pasta I find hard to believe people just happily hooked up their personal PC's to work - that would have been a red flag for me!
You can monitor work without being personally intrusive. The figures are quite shocking to me.

[Peter Pedant]

difference between 'can' ( spy on me) and 'did' ( dirty bagga!)
this is about home working and are they really working?

actually - "are they doing the work," I think is a better metric

The beeb link
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-51571684
is about workplace monitoring
and NOT about working at home and spying

and this leads to me conclude that it is a rushed piece and not thought out and written for £ per column inch

the ICO should be able to advise - and I think he wd say
1. yes but give notice
2. not out of hours - but hours do slip at home
3. can you monitor but immediately ditch the feed ( no records) - I wd say yes - like unstored cctv

sorry - taking TTT seriously - always a waste of time
none of these concepts are beyond the ken of the average ABer ?
they are arent they

[chelle7272]

PP I can monitor all our staff activity online (should we want to) through our Microsoft online programmes.
That management reserve the right to examine staff members IT activity if deemed necessary is pretty standard in an IT policy.

There is absolutely no need to have cameras on staff at home at any time, outside of meetings they have joined.

[dannyk13]

PP average aber?

[Lie-in King]

No, I would not.

[bednobs]

that article does not say they were using cameras to look at the employees homes, rather that they could see what the employee had on their screen nd what they were watching/reading
Anyone who DOESN'T think their employers can/will do this is bonkers

[youngmafbog]

I'm a little confused on this article.

"They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations."

What exactly does that mean? Presumably they were asked to connect in to the servers but that is a no-no from a private machine unless you are operating something like a Citrix session down a VPN to the company. Anything else is totally unsecure and ripe for hacking. If you do use the citrix VPN option then it would not be able to look at other apps, indeed all printing and drives would be locked from the session.

All in all this doesnt add up.

[ladybirder]

And they were doing this 24/7. No I wouldn't work for them.

[chelle7272]

The article does say cameras are used to monitor staff at home, if not specific the case given .

//And it wants the government to make it explicitly illegal for employers to use webcams to monitor home workers, apart from when they are taking part in meetings and calls//

[youngmafbog]

On monitoring a friend of mine and myself wrote a set of programs that would 'spy' on staff on a mainframe some 20 years ago. It would monitor what queues you went into how long you took to process each piece of work and whether you were cherry picking work. All sent down MQ to a server where Business objects analysed it and presented it to managers.

That was for one of the worlds biggest Banks, its not new. spying on staff.

Also many Banks I have worked at the internet and personal phones are not allowed in the office.

[Prudie]

I think if you work for a big company and you work from home then yes you should expect this. My company has monitored our internet usage and sites visited for years. So they should IMO. As someoen who's been able to work from home if I fancied since the pandemic I'm the first to admit I can log on first thing and as long as I pop back and forth to check I've not gone to sleep I can do sweet FA all day and get paid for it, including watching youtube etc etc on my work PC. As this is likely to be the working pattern for many even post pandemic you can't expect employers to just let people do what they want without some means of control/insight.

[youngmafbog]

Right, so you have 200 employees at home and your going to monitor them with a web cam. Yes of course you are, all 200 of them.

It just doesnt add up.

[youngmafbog]

//My company has monitored our internet usage and sites visited for years//

Haha, yes been going on for years.

I caught the HR Director going into porn sites!

[barry1010]

I would work for such a company but only because I have other pcs and devices I could keep separate for personal use. If I had only one machine and there was no way of disconnecting outside work hours I would not be happy

[youngmafbog]

If you do use your own PC, or you have admin rights to your work one there is a program called mouse jiggler. It effectively keeps you machine from going to sleep making it appear you are permanently logged in.

Again I caught a senior member of the team using this!

[ToraToraTora]

YMB 10:51, I wondered that, the work machine would (should?) be using VDI but I suspect they have been ordered to have their personal laptops using some sort of desk top sharing software.

[youngmafbog]

//If I had only one machine and there was no way of disconnecting outside work hours I would not be happy//

If its your own machine you can disconnect it outside of hours. They wouldnt be able to override your admin rights to do so.

This article is full of holoes

[barry1010]

My pc was being monitored when I was in the office, I was monitored on CCTV, too. It was accepted practice in the workplace and monitoring at home during work hours is acceptable too.

[Peter Pedant]

// I caught the HR Director going into porn sites!//

we used to er log on with each others log words
and one time got a warning about nardy nardy sites - - -

the BMJ journal site ( presumably worried about nardy photies on the journal - diseased smelly doodahs etc )

oh whilst we are it - - how do you erase emails - mozilla just throws them out and I want to corral them and erase them.....