Unless you’re running the company, and you’re the only employee, your work internet usage is being monitored and logged at some level. Believing otherwise is giving your employer a very generous benefit of the doubt, let’s say, but still probably naive. It’s worth understanding why all companies might be required by law to monitor, or short of that, be incentivized to monitor employee internet usage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior
https://www.spamtitan.com/web-filtering/liability-for-employ...
When you say you don’t log or monitor usage, have you actively audited your company equipment and disabled all logging? Have you contacted your ISP and cloud providers to discuss what data they have? Aside from your company network equipment, it’s not easy to make sure you’re not “monitoring” from the employees perspective, if you provide company computers or phones, or any cloud services to your employees.
As a business owner, what would you do if you were contacted with a cease and desist letter from another company claiming your business domain was doing something illegal? What would you do if one of your employees told you another employee was doing something illegal at work and the employee denied it?
I do find your language interesting, especially as a business owner. Using the words ‘betray’, ‘trust’, and ‘spy’, seems like a very one-sided view of the situation, and one that comes with some assumptions. In the US, most employment contracts, and employee trainings, will disclose the fact that company equipment is monitored for aggregate or individual behavior, and it is stated and agreed to that the equipment is for work use, not personal use. Because employees are notified and they actively agree to use work equipment for only work reasons, there is no “spying” or “betraying of trust” taking place. Trust goes both ways as well, and when an employee agrees to use work equipment only for work, and then turn around a browse Facebook while getting paid, or download porn from the work domain, the employees have not just betrayed the company trust, but have also broken their explicit agreements.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0818e4d9-ee76...
https://www.spamtitan.com/web-filtering/liability-for-employ...
Centralized logging and review is the norm and I do have data to say that. You are wrong.
Now, of course, most of it never gets near the office.
Which is why there are dozens and dozens of companies to which this sort of thing is outsourced, either explicitly, or as part of some generic security "suite."
Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations both require centralized logging and review of those logs for audit reasons.
Basically if your company provides health insurance or processes payments, your activity on all corporate machines are being aggregated and monitored. Even GDPR has a loophole for information security monitoring.
Maybe you work for a tiny startup that hasn’t started logging your usage yet, but pretty much all non-small companies in the US have to have automated monitoring of usage for liability reasons (I guess you didn’t actually read my links). Many companies need to know how much time employees spend on Facebook while at work in the aggregate, and while finding that out might seem creepy, what’s also creepy is employees being on Facebook while they’re getting paid to work. Even if you don’t, some people have problems with this and spend a lot of time on Facebook, or other sites, while getting paid to supposedly work. Internet usage monitoring is often the result of employee complaints to management about other employees.
One company I worked at received legal threats from a media conglomerate because of torrent sharing of new release movies. Turns out the employee was just downloading porn because the work internet connection was much higher bandwidth than his home connection, and a hidden bot in the software he was using was doing other illegal torrent activity. The company didn’t figure it out immediately because they weren’t creepily actively reviewing internet connections, but between the logs that were there and some sleuthing, they figured out who the employee was. My company didn’t give a crap about the porn (though told the employee please never do that at work) but the movies being shared could have been millions of dollars in damage.
If you are at a small company that isn’t monitoring yet, and your company grows, it will happen to you eventually. Otherwise, if you’re not at a small company, chances are high that you already are being logged and don’t know it. In any case, there’s no good reason to pass judgement on HN users who work for companies that do this; it’s ubiquitous and there is no clear cut line on where monitoring begins, and more importantly no reasonable expectation of privacy while at work in the US, except in the bathroom.
Aside from all that, your ISP and the backbone providers and the ISPs of every site you visit is - 100% chance - monitoring connections. The majority of commercial sites on the internet are gathering analytics. Facebook and Google are watching everything they possibly can. Your employer monitoring may be the least of your problems, as long as you’re not surfing all day at work.