In all of my IT jobs I would have been fired if I had signed into work accounts on my personal phone. It’s a pretty big security risk.
I was at a subsidiary of a very large company and had work slack, email, and all my code on my phone, without even the thing that lets them remote wipe your phone.
It has to do with culture and willingness to put in the effort by the security organization
While true, most enterprises have ways to silo and encrypt their data on non company controlled devices.
Android does something like that when you install ms office apps with administrator controlled policies
Fuck their data, what about my own? That pest of an app is not getting onto my device. And neither is anything else that gives an employer any control over my device.
A totally reasonable stance.
For clarity, the android feature essentially makes a work dedicated partition on the phone. Their management app can manage that partition, and for the purposes of data movement it’s essentially a distinct phone.
If they’ve set it up correctly they can do a remote wipe without touching your personal data.
In a lot of cases the drive to have users use their personal devices rather than employer owned ones comes from the users, not the workplace. Only needing to keep track of one device is easier in many cases.
Most companies seem to have don’t ask, don’t tell policies in place.
Technically we’re not allowed to use Teams on our phones, but most of us do, including management.
I’m also technically not allowed to use Spotify on my laptop, but if they’d enforce that ban, IT would be gone tomorrow.
Unless it’s 24h gold service with 24k gold pay, the work phone gets turned off at the end of office hours.
Eh, it doesn’t need to be, you just need to do the work of putting together granular access controls that can account for your risk profiles.
The risk isn’t much different between a company owned telephone and a personal telephone.
They’re both susceptible to most of the same attacks, or being left on the bus.
In my current job the old manager okayed working on our own devices.
I would use my personal workstation to ssh into and do work on my work mac, did that for a few years. saved me disassembling my desk between uses every day or buying a costly KVM.
They seem to be getting a lot more uptight about security these days (although the “you can work on personal devices” rule hasnt been explicitly rescinded) so i have stopped interaction between my personal devices and work devices.
Having a M2 mac recently makes it easier, i can lie in bed and work pretty much all day on a single charge so my desk remains intact
The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
I’m learning that the hard way. Started working for this company 2 hours from home,because I could WFH 3 days a week. Now they want me to come in 4 days a week. So I’m looking for a new job now. Which is a shame, because I do like the job.
What does your contract say? With this back to work bullshit I made sure my contract explicitly said I was remote.
Doesn’t mean they won’t change their mind but maybe I’ll get severance instead of fired for cause of they have a back to the office push.
most hires don’t get contracts
edit: in USA. we get offer letters, take it or leave it. your job duties can change on the fly, no “contract” to abide by. do the job or leave/get fired. there is some negotiating room, but not a lot
Incoming employment terms amendment:
You can work from home but only to answer us when we contact you. You must answer our contact and must report to the location if requested. If you can do something cheaper (for us the company) and faster (for us the company) then that is the only time you may perform a work duty at home.
It’s EU law that if you have to be standby to pick up the phone and go on location at a moment’s notice, those are working hours and need to be paid in full. Most companies are pretty careful to not put it anywhere in the contracts or house rules that you have to be on stand-by, but just verbally keep pushing for it. If they keep pushing, push back with asking for the written rules.
That sounds like something a functioning government would do.
In America, we get the “privilege” of At-Will employment.
It’s the same in the US. 5 CFR 551.431
You must answer our contact
“I cannot answer the company contact after hours because for every call I get after hours that isn’t a company contact, following an order from work to monitor those on the chance of a company contact itself represents ‘working from home’ which the company forbids. I cannot violate the previously stated company policy.”
“No, not like that!”
Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.
Here we call it “standard operation” and it’s also a kind of “white strike”
