Agreed, this is creepy, unnecessary, and possibly even damaging to whatever litigation is pending. (Assuming the litigation thing is even true, which I personally doubt.) Even if they do need an image of the drive, the people in IT shouldn’t be the ones pawing through it. That’s a job for a professional investigator or a lawyer. I ran an IT department for four years and if any of my staff did something like this, at the very least they’d be getting a closed door conversation about why this isn’t ok.

It’s pretty common practice to capture system images from returned employee equipment when they’re fired for cause (at least in the US). But it’s also pretty common for technicians to be forbidden from browsing those files without a very good reason.

If they were let go for cause then the laptop history is useful probably in case of lawsuit or unemployment claims.

Is it, though? I genuinely don’t think so. Performance stuff like this is usually documented via your HR stuff, the PIP etc.

“This guy was browsing incel forums from this time to this time”

Which court in what land uses that information?

Sounds kind of mythical, especially since I’m sure there’s an army of other people on idiot forums like that who are nonetheless performing fine.

EDIT: Okay, you guys hit me with sufficient downvotes that I’m rate limited so I know the predominant view is different.

Fine. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you this. If some rando IT dude is going through folks’ computers after they quit and I find out, I am quitting your company and telling everyone. I have never done that to anyone reporting to me and no company has ever done that to me. I can’t believe you’d accept these work conditions. Wild.

It makes sense if you think you're likely to have to defend the decision in court. For instance, I've worked on a team where a guy was fired for performance reasons that were obvious to all of us, but he sued and claimed it was discrimination. HR had known of a performance problem and the process was documented, but if the trustworthiness of the manager who gave them all that information is cast in doubt, could they really defend it quickly and decisively in court? We all had to be deposed. Imagine if it became a lengthy court case. I imagine it would be nice for the company to have a paper trail of convincing evidence of a performance problem. A timeline of significant, non-work web browsing during work hours on work machines would do the trick, and protect the rest of the team and the company.

That said, I agree with the commenters that I wouldn't want to work somewhere that did this as a matter of routine. I always have my work laptop encrypted with a key only I know and I have not (yet) been forced to give work root access for management. I'm always confident handing in my laptop that they couldn't find anything even if there was something.

>Fine. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you this. If some rando IT dude is going through folks’ computers after they quit and I find out, I am quitting your company and telling everyone. I have never done that to anyone reporting to me and no company has ever done that to me. I can’t believe you’d accept these work conditions. Wild.

Every large company I've worked at or heard of it's pretty much assumed that IT may monitor everything you do on their machine. Everyone knew this. Which is why you don't use the company laptop for personal use.

IT may have the legal right and often the technical ability to monitor any activity on work computers.

But it is stupid to allow any old IT staff to do so, and this thread is a good illustration of why: because most IT staff do not have the discipline or smarts to keep what they learn sufficiently confidential. Allowing IT staff to browse the files of other staff at will can lead to other HR problems such as harassment or even blackmail, or loss of corporate reputation if people post embarrassing stuff in, say, a public HN thread.

The ability should be exercised only under the supervision of a lawyer, which limits bad behavior and creates attorney-client privilege for discussions of what might be found.

This can be a double edged sword though.

I worked at a place that did have good 'secrecy' around most monitoring. While I was one of three people outside of Infosec that managed to find out that someone was let go because they were caught exfiltrating client/employee PIFI... I'm pretty sure nobody who was possibly compromised got informed.

This was a place that was so concerned with image that the handbook was about as strict as what my Sister had to deal with when teaching at a Catholic school. Image was everything to them.

Is it same in EU? If I read the law correctly I understood they need a good reason to monitor and they definitely need to notify you and ask for consent.

I have been using my work laptop quite heavily for personal use and I would prefer not to stop honestly.

I believe my intentions are pure and to provide value, I understand world is not perfect, but I would not want to work for an employer that needed to monitor me.

IANAL, but as far as I read into the situation, employee monitoring is a very dangerous field. There are exceptions, however, such as company-provided http(s) proxies and more concrete monitoring or investigation when suspicion arises (I know of two cases where employees were suspected of consuming child porn and they were both monitored as well as having their hardware seized).

Lastly, the companies or specific malicious admins might simply not care about the legality and still monitor you - either for company reasons or simply to stir through your data. If they have admin access to your computer, it's simply not your computer.

"This guy was stealing company data"

"This guy was conducting illegal business using the company's network"

"This guy was running his own mining rig on company servers"

It's not hard to think of actual cases that happen.

If someone is that bad that they run mining rigs on your servers, I suspect a little personal web use is the least of your worries :)

Sure, but fortunately we’re not context-free text generators. We are able to see that we are in a thread where the guy was let go for poor performance. Like that shit is not “poor performance”.

Y’all are playing me if you think that.

> Is it, though? I genuinely don’t think so.

Are you a lawyer?

> Which court in what land uses that information?

That seems like a question for the legal department, not for the IT department.

You're doing this thing that smart people do (I know because I do it myself if I'm not careful) where you way overstep your area of expertise. It's not a good look, avoid the trap.

EDIT: You've changed your stance from a general stance to a specifically ethical stance here, and I agree: it would be better if employers respected the privacy of their employees more.

However, that's just not the world we live in. From the perspective of an employer, you can make your choice to behave ethically regardless of the legal implications, and that's a choice that I would laud you for. But from the perspective of an employee, you shouldn't assume that your employer will behave ethically: on the contrary, I would always assume that your employer is going to go through your computer when you give it back. You can fight that if you want, but that's not the hill I would choose to die on, as there are much worse privacy violations going on.

If you want to see how bad things have gotten, freeze your credit, sign up for credit monitoring, and then start applying for jobs, and see what happens. About 75% of jobs I've applied for in the last few years have tried to pull credit reports--and you can't really stop them as long as they do a "soft" credit check (freezing credit doesn't block this).

> I don’t see why anyone would do anything else.

Because that is the smart thing to do. I got to purchase my laptop when I left the company, and they still wiped it out before handling it. It protects them and it protects me. I do not want access to any company resource, it can only hurt me. And they are not interested anymore on what was in the laptop either.

We were investigating the employee as part of their offboarding.

> We were investigating the employee as part of their offboarding.

I do not know how it works in your country, but anything that you discover of his personal life becomes a liability for the company. If he had AIDS and now you get that knowledge and it leaks, you may find the company fined for big money. In Europe, again and again, companies are forbidden to use any knowledge gained spying on employees.

What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.

I strongly agree that IT needs ethical education. That you have access to some information does not mean that you have the right to access it or that it is moral to do so.

Legal reasons for pending litigation. And we're not in Europe.

(I'm in the US and have worked a similar job as the parent poster and have had to do similar things on several occasions.)

>What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway? Unless it has some contractual impact and your company HR/legal department is aware, there is no reason. "To see what the employee was doing" is not a legal reason.

In our case, we would and could never investigate someone for any reason besides HR and/or legal explicitly requesting it for a specific reason and telling us what they wanted us to look for and why. "Fishing expeditions" weren't permitted. (There were a few occasions where such fishing expedition requests did come from them, and our managers would push back and basically professionally tell them to fuck off.)

I'm not sure of any specific laws or liabilities, but I'm sure we also would (and should) have likely been sued if we discovered some sensitive personal information about an employee and that information then leaked. If we inadvertently stumbled across personal things like that during the course of a specific investigation, we would always ignore it and not make any record of it. We didn't care about someone's personal life and didn't intentionally ever look at anything related to it.

Due to the nature of the investigations, it was often unavoidable that we'd end up seeing something at least somewhat personal, even if it's just some random website they habitually browsed appearing multiple times in their browsing history.

So, we would never look at an employee's computer or network traffic "just to see what they were doing" or just because we could. That would definitely be extremely unethical and unprofessional, and if management discovered any of us doing that we surely would and should have been fired. However, I'm not sure if there are actually any laws against that in the US if it's disclosed in the employment contract.

> What reason would you have to investigate an employee that is leaving the company anyway?

Well, an obvious one is "did we fire him for cause or will we have to pay more unemployment"...

Okay, man, I’ll trust that you’re doing this because they were stealing stuff or something like that but if it’s just sucking at their job then damn, dude. That’s like kinda a shitty thing.

Sure it’s company hardware, and you get to do this shit but damn that shit would be like “I gotta get out of here” if I heard IT was scanning people’s browser history for sucking at their jobs.

EDIT: The lawsuit thing makes this even worse. If I even heard that someone was suing their employees for poor performance I am like straight up blackballing that company and all of its damn subsidiaries as places to work. Like my friends would know, my family would know, friends of my family would know. I’m sorry, this is straight up unacceptable to me.

It's important to document and archive the contents for liability reasons, but the takeaway here is that you should remember that the laptop belongs to the company and you have zero rights to privacy on it, so conduct yourself appropriately.

Depends where. Here in Europe it has been said that a Personal folder cannot be looked at by the company. But ofc it can ask you to delete it or fire you if you spend too much time idling but Personal data is Personal.

This is a major cultural difference between US and EU. In the U.S., data is only Personal if it's on a Personal device.

>It's important to document and archive the contents for liability reasons

Unless this guy was sexually harassing people, I'm curious how this is going to protect anyone from any kind of liability.

>you should remember that the laptop belongs to the company and you have zero rights to privacy on it, so conduct yourself appropriately.

Yes, but as others have mentioned, just because the company has the right to do that doesn't mean it's either ethical OR good. No one here was asserting the right to privacy on company owned hardware.

Agreed. If he's already been let go, who cares what's on his laptop?

I assume it's for liability reasons in case they start a lawsuit.

I pretty much assume they're watching everything I do on a work computer. I don't do anything that would be too embarrassing to see sitting printed out on my supervisor's desk.

Same here. It's my only Windows machine and the only one that reliably prints some PDFs. If they cared that I'm printing out MLP RPG sheets to play with my daughter I'll have that conversation.

I Never have work email on any other device but works.

I used to work with a security guy who tried to make it a policy that staff would have to hand over their social media logins to make sure that they weren't talking to anyone or having any conversations that were "suspicious".

Fortunately that idea was beaten to a bloody pulp by the HR team before it got off the ground. But you would not believe the mall cop mentality in many companies.