TLDR; Make sure MDM profiles are gone and the laptops are cleared before doing anything personal :D
Should we though? what you and the parent outline is a most sensible way of accommodating it while minimising invasion of privacy, however I question the underlying reasoning, and therefore whether or not we should encourage it. What perceived gains are to be had beyond merely box checking for accreditations? and in those cases why is it part of those accreditations, what is the intended effect? I can think of a few but they are all flawed or attempting to enforce something impossible:
1. Preventing leaking code/IP (But if you can't trust them they could just as easily take a picture of the screen, capture the HDMI, copy the drive, even log their own keyboard... there are always side channels unless you physically control the environment).
2. Preventing them from doing something malicious... But if they are writing code for you and they are untrustworthy, isn't it already game over?
3. Bean counting, monitoring time spent at keyboard etc - which we all know is not an accurate metric of productivity for cognitive work.
4. Similarly to #1 and #2, unintentional breach or security issues, i.e you trust the person but not their device or their ability to secure their own device - In which case spyware seems wholly inadequate to cope with this situation, if you are serious about this, you should be controlling the hardware and OS (which lots of orgs with highly sensitive info do).
In all these cases spyware is futile. Am I missing something?
Very much required for compliance, zero trust, protection of IP, and foundational to a reasonable security plan.
On second thought, this _is_ the answer... they are making a compromise on security, it's an economic decision. Maybe it makes sense from a business perspective: check some boxes, get a bit of security (not much) for almost nothing - but as you can probably tell, I think it's both pretentious and disrespectful.
That said, a lot of users _want_ to use their own devices (maybe they have better equipment, maybe it's less locked down, maybe they don't want duplicates). It's not sane for the business to allow a device that is more likely to be compromised and/or have poor security hygiene on the network.
I'm a fan of privacy but... At least on my team, we're definitely not spying on you, we're making sure you have a password, encryption, antivirus, and updates installed before you can connect to resources. It's shocking how many people don't have authentication enabled and run as root, if they have a choice, on their home system. That said - we could flip switches and do a lot more spying if it was mandated :/
Anything but this, and it’s clear you’re just evil.
Not if they are at the point where they need SOC2 cert, and where they install agents on their employees computers (and want to extend that to their suppliers).
But there are a couple of our contractors that rejected this for exactly this reason (they had other clients). For one of them, we just bought him a laptop that he does all our work on (it cost less than 1 day of his time, so it was a no brainer), and the other, we realized we didn't have to as long as he did periodic (documented) reporting of screenshots of his OS version being up to date, Disk Encryption enabled, and screen saver settings are appropriate. And they legally attest that they make a best faith effort to delete any sensitive data off their laptops (if they ever download it).
We've talked to a couple of auditors and that seems to be sufficient and pragmatic as it accomplishes the same goal.
Every company I’ve ever worked at, and that includes very large ones, will have legal, HR, and finance tell you at some point that “you must do X”. Sometimes X is no big deal and you do it. Sometimes it’s hard, and you ask the business to fund it or remove the requirement. Sometimes it’s nonsensical in your context and at that point the job becomes understanding why X is a requirement and how you can satisfy that requirement in some more pragmatic way.
At the end of the day, these functions are there to support the business.
One day they sent out a particularly onerous "agreement" that said that we agreed not to use a phone while driving a car and doing so would be cause for termination etc.
I went down to HR and asked them if they were really trying to regulate what I was doing in my personal vehicle with my personal phone and they replied "No, its only meant for when you're in a company vehicle or using a company phone."
But the agreement itself clearly stated any phone any car.
The workaround I came up with was this-- a friend of mine and I swapped forms, and signed each others names. HR had their illegal, unenforceable agreement, and life moved on.
I got my "revenge" 6 months or so later. HR was frantically calling me for some reason-- I was stuck on the freeway as is our custom in Orange County. I ignored them for something like two hours, and explained that "I was stuck in traffic and as they were no doubt aware, we are prohibited by company policy from using our phones while operating a vehicle."
The HR gal was visibly pissed off, but to be fair, I could have been fired for answering that phone call.
I am not a lawyer, obviously, but what I meant was, threatening someone to sign a legal document can't be legal, even if its your employer.
If the company made the mistake of creating a policy that they use this software as one of their controls, then the auditor will ding them if they don’t use it.
It’s an absurd system.
A PCI question asks if all outbound traffic is explicitly authorized. I took that to mean getting a list of all the IPs for the APIs of services we hit, and even constructed that entire list except for one, the payment processor itself.
The payment processor did not have any stable IPs, and could not give me a list. Their official solution was to have our policy be that we explicitly allow _all_ outbound traffic.
If such an option is allowed by PCI, what is even the point of making it a requirement?
I made that joke to a VP once, and he brightened up and said "Yes! Exactly! Because until you're actually following explicit processes, you don't even know what you're doing wrong, in order to fix it!"
So I'm a lot less cynical about auditing certifications like this now.
The point of all those certifications (I took companies through the processes required for PCI, SOC2, and ISO27001 ) is security theater, a path in the back for the execs, the ability to have "I'm not to blame, I have this cert" in case of some shit happening, and the ability for sales to throw TLAs to prospects to show how Seriously(tm) the company takes security. Oh, and to check boxes to be able to transact with some large corporations.
There are plenty of stories of highly certified companies that were deeply penetrated and exposed, and all their security theater did not help.
The problem isn't these low bars, but rather the market for services to "help" people clear them, and the widespread perception that the bars are higher than they actually are.
My point is that if/when you get to need a SOC2 certification, you put the resources towards this, and you definitely have the financial/org means to procure hardware to suppliers if required.
Just remember to put some customized adhesives telling what laptop is rented to what customer.
That's not OP's problem.
Noooo. Armfuls of watches are just for hilarious movies and such. It's not supposed to have a corporate elementttt. The cyberpunk vibes are too much with this.
I worked for a big company that had various spyware thingies installed on all the company laptops, but they let you use your personal mobile devices for work (including iPad which was pretty nice) -- and wanted you to install their preferred spyware on it. I didn't do that but I expected they would eventually tell me to do it or stop using my personal iPad.
It seems like now that it's technically feasible, big corporate IT managers want their spyware of choice running everywhere. Someday you will have an arm full of Apple Watches, one for each client. You should embrace this future and price it in.