Personal files on work computer?

[jcommin]

Why oh why would you have personal stuff on a company owned computer? Add to that a work phone.

My lesson learned years ago - you get let go for whatever reason - you get walked out the door. Grab your coat, go to HR: do not pass go, do not collect $200. - you are not going back to pack things up. My personal stuff is send to me as I'm no longer welcomed. I have seen 40+ yr veterans get walked out. It is chilling.

There are no personal files/contacts/internet history on any company device. Nope - It's just a bad idea. I have seen people get fired for Facebook/porn/personal email, etc.

[Por_sha911]

I haven't read all the posts but based on the title: Bad idea on several levels.
-Anything on the company computer become company property. You have zero rights to privacy.
-If the company machine has a key stroke logger, all your data and passwords are now theirs.
-You can be accused of doing personal things on the company time.
-If the computer gets a virus, you will be a prime suspect for having brought it in.
-Since you have control over the level of security, if the company gets hacked, you are hacked.


Keep everything separate. At the place where I work, attaching a jump drive to the company computer is a firing offense (to protect the company data and customer's data he store). Get a cheap laptop of your own and bring it in with you.

[A930Rocket]

I have a couple of items (nothing earth shattering) on my work laptop, but will be copying them to a thumb drive in a few days and deleting them. Nothing there with personal identifiable information.

[Sooner or later]

Never did it.

[Por_sha911]

[QUOTE=A930Rocket;11230795]I have a couple of items (nothing earth shattering) on my work laptop, but will be copying them to a thumb drive in a few days and deleting them. Nothing there with personal identifiable information.[/QUOTE
what if the company gets hacked and someone says they saw you downloading files onto a thumb drive and put it in your pocket?

[jyl]

Another option is to encrypt any personal stuff that you keep on your work laptop.

It used to be hard to not have ANY personal stuff on your work laptop, because carrying two laptops is a pain and when you’re in a hotel and want to do some personal stuff, you’re not going to wait until you get home.

So I may or may not have once completely wiped my work laptop, before handing it in with my badge. As in, opened the machine up, pulled the drive, plugged it into my desktop, used secure delete software to overwrite every bit on the drive, put the drive back in the machine and handed in a dead machine. IT re-images the machine anyway before issuing it to the next drone, and any actual work data was always on a network drive so all that was being wiped was Windows OS, Office and some standard apps.

Now, with cloud storage easily available, there’s no reason to keep anything personal on a work machine. Unless IT blocks access to cloud services etc, as some do.

[stomachmonkey]

Nope.

I have personal PC's.

I have separate PC's for my current company.

I have separate PC's for the companies I consult for.

Just got 1st round funding for a new start up, bought another PC.

Prevents me from sending email to A from B's account, mixing up their files, messaging the wrong channels on Teams or Slack.

It's also the only way to handle overlapping video calls. Not uncommon for me to be on 2-3 video calls simultaneously.

And yes, it sucks as bad as it sounds.

[sc_rufctr]

Personal files on work computer?

As long as it's not porn of political I don't see a problem with it.

But as a support tech I have had to deal with someone who had filled his hard drive up with personal photos and videos.
Imagine having to fix a laptop that has 420GB of personal photos/videos and it wont boot normally!

And of course the idiot didn't back them up so I had to copy the photos before rebuilding the laptop to fix the problem.

That may sound easy but I had to boot it into "safe mode with networking" and then copy them over the local network.
It took more than 20 hours to do that! (The idiot was a VIP and his hard drive was encrypted so there was no other option)

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

What are you talking about? Nothing business proprietary is stored on my personal computer. We have processes in place that allow email, web work, online meeting, etc. to take place on any computer. If it becomes business proprietary, we have ways of dealing with that so I don’t host the files.

Since I own the computer I can do personal business on the computer without shifting back and forth between a company asset and my own computer. If I chose to use a company asset to access our online tools, I would not use it for personal business

It is that simple. Don’t over think it.

Got it, so you're likely doing some sort of VPN or remote access. That wasn't clear from your initial post.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

Personal files on work computer?

As long as it's not porn of political I don't see a problem with it.

But as a support tech I have had to deal with someone who had filled his hard drive up with personal photos and videos.
Imagine having to fix a laptop that has 420GB of personal photos/videos and it wont boot normally!

And of course the idiot didn't back them up so I had to copy the photos before rebuilding the laptop to fix the problem.

That may sound easy but I had to boot it into "safe mode with networking" and then copy them over the local network.
It took more than 20 hours to do that! (The idiot was a VIP and his hard drive was encrypted so there was no other option)

I used to work for a smallish company that had technicians that traveled to oil rigs, drill ships, etc... in the Gulf of Mexico, Africa, etc... I was talking to one of the IT guys that did desktop support once. He told me that a lot of those techs and some other guys in the business offices that should know better, had porn, including home made (wives, girlfriends, whatever) on their laptops. He'd apparently seen some stuff that you just can't unsee.