I've heard some pretty simultaneously funny and Orwellian stories about this, mostly about people being fired for looking at porn using work laptops and the specific porn they were looking at.

Don't use work computers to look at porn, your employers already know about it.

Lol I nominate the above to the title of most entitled and out of touch comment of the month. How is this "basic human need" if online porn didn't even exist before 1990?

Neither did the internet. Or electricity before that.

And none of those are basic human needs. They're just comforts we've grown accustomed to.

You're using a different definition than i am then, and dare I say, an archaic one.

Basic human needs and rights only make sense in the context of the society in which said humans are a part of.

Homeless? Not a problem in nomadic tribes. Cities? Basic need / right.

Access to food services? Not a problem for the Buddhist monk. Cities? Basic need / right.

Electricity? Not a problem for the Amish. Cities? Basic need / right.

Internet? Perhaps not as established as the above, but definitely establishing itself very quickly in most cities.

Eh, you can't even apply for a job without internet access these days. I'd say internet access is essential for participation in society.

So you say it’s fine if your office had no electricity and running water?

If it's not required to do the job and they pay well, then why not. I can easily survive 8 hours without running water. Geologists (often with masters or even PhDs titles) working in the field have neither, and they like their jobs.

Moreover, seeing the right to be paid for jerking off while at work as fundamental human right is really unhinged.

Correct. Rape, theft, murder, and other actions can be performed along the way of people fulfilling their basic human needs, so the reasoning doesn't really justify all activities.

The way I look at it (and not saying it is the best way, just works for me) is that my public/professional person is my brand that the world sees and thinks of when I interact with them. Regardless whether that is big brother junior analyst in IT or a client CEO, I try to keep that consistent and inviting.

If on the weekend I want to only drink Soylent, trade crypto, and otherwise engage in fun but less inviting behaviors, I'll do that off company property.

I'm as sex positive as they come but even I think it'd be pretty dumb to have pornhub pop up while you're sharing your screen in a meeting or something

About as dumb as having model train collector site up, or reddit or hn or whatever...

It was actually kinda a joke with my friend when used to help him code. Leave something nasty open just for amusement.

One good reason is that porn sites are notoriously riddles with browser 0 days. To this day I get the odd Safari crash every other month.

We've decided to structure society such that some people starve, and we consider that acceptable. There are even children who are "food insecure".

Apparently nobody cares about anyone else's most basic needs like food (even our most vulnerable), I can't see how they'd care about someone else's need to jerk off.

It's very common. Most IT groups collect this information for HR and don't do anything with it. The truth is the company doesn't care if you look at porn as long as you do your job. Until the day comes that the company wants to fire you. If you claim retaliation/discrimination/etc, company just opens up your file and lists all the violations.

My prior employer was the same, I wouldn't use it to make tooling or do anything that might be for my own business, or open source for that matter, they had been known to strong arm staff into giving over IP that might have ever been on that laptop or was ever created during your employment.

But they were quite frank about allowing us to do what ever we want on the laptops providing we delivered positive outcomes for the business.

If this meant the laptops were used to browse porn at home or even during business hours (clearly not on the shop floor if you were in the office) or playing video games, it was fair game.

This employer also had _incredibly_ poor standards and culture for removing misogyny and bigotry, in fact it was one of the worst I've ever seen. Not saying causation = correlation or similar but an interesting data point nonetheless.

Apple generally encourages employees to use their devices as they usually would to “dogfood”.

Some cynicism on the part of their engineers would be prudent despite that advice. Lots of places encourage you to use the company phone as your only phone, which is convenient, but still not a great idea.

Once when another person in IT was on vacation, I was handed off a manager's laptop to scan for porn. There was no automated tool, so as I recall I did a search for files created or modified since the last check. I found nothing to report.

I think that the periodic checks were set up because a subordinate of the manager's had seen the porn on the machine, and had gone to HR.