Ask HN: What can employers monitor while you work from home? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What can employers monitor while you work from home?

#11

Post by moretta » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 12:48 PM UTC

rogerkirkness wrote: post #2

We ask employees to install a monitoring agent based on OSQuery for compliance reasons. It does very little. It queries (read-only) OS meta details about whether or not they're using antivirus (true/false), have a password manager (true/false), the HD is encrypted (true/false), whether or not location services is active (true/false) and a list of applications. I think this is pretty typical. Some companies might go d…

I've been looking for a solution like this aside from the standard Jamf/Fleetsmith options which are quite intrusive and give too much access to devices. Did you build that monitoring agent yourself, or is it an already available solution?

Re: Ask HN: What can employers monitor while you work from home?

#12

Post by rebelshrug » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

drpebcak wrote: post #8

They certainly CAN monitor all of this.. but a lot of them don’t. I don’t think it really matters if the mouse or something is yours, it’s really about the computer itself. The policies and practices vary between companies. Are you suggesting there might be an issue because they are ‘using your resources’ to do this? Would be interesting to see the liability a company opens themselves up to by monitoring an unaware e…

> Are you suggesting there might be an issue because they are ‘using your resources’ to do this?

Not suggesting, but asking. It certainly feels invasive to me, though.

Re: Ask HN: What can employers monitor while you work from home?

#13

Post by c0nducktr » Mon, Aug 17, 2020, 1:44 AM UTC

rogerkirkness wrote: post #2

We ask employees to install a monitoring agent based on OSQuery for compliance reasons. It does very little. It queries (read-only) OS meta details about whether or not they're using antivirus (true/false), have a password manager (true/false), the HD is encrypted (true/false), whether or not location services is active (true/false) and a list of applications. I think this is pretty typical. Some companies might go d…

Does your company require location services to be enabled, or disabled?

I've always kept it disabled for privacy reasons, and also that I've never seen much utility in it myself.