Legal expert says court ruling in case where information accessed on Mecrus work laptop confirms ‘Australians still don’t have a right to privacy’
Deceptichum
link
fedilink
61Y

That’s what we have to do.

It’s not what we should have to be doing, protections need to be put in place to safeguard citizens privacy instead of promoting corporate overreach.

@johntash@eviltoast.org
link
fedilink
English
21Y

If you want privacy, don’t use a work device for personal stuff and don’t use a personal device for work stuff. Corporations are always going to want to monitor their own equipment for data exfil, etc, I don’t think any laws are going to tell them not to.

Deceptichum
link
fedilink
2
edit-2
1Y

We need laws to make them not to, just like we have laws that tell them they cannot put cameras in the toilet.

We should not forfeit our right to privacy just because they’re a company and demand it and the meek accept that outcome.

@johntash@eviltoast.org
link
fedilink
English
21Y

We need laws to make them not to

That would conflict with laws that protect your PII/PHI. Are you okay with a doctor saving your health information onto their personal cell phone? Or a bank teller with access to move money between accounts able to do so from their cell phone at a bar while drunk? Or a plastic surgeon posting photos of their patients to social media without their consent?

Corporations suck, but people also suck. Even if there’s no malice intended, the average person is bad at personal security and can’t really be trusted to protect data that the corporation is legally responsible for protecting.

We should not forfeit our right to privacy

My point from before was that if you want privacy, don’t use a device that you don’t own. If you’re doing something not work related, use your own device and don’t use the corporate wifi.

Deceptichum
link
fedilink
11Y

You actually think, corporations shouldn’t be able to snoop through your emails is the same as employees will post your private details on the internet???

No fuck this, no one can be that unbelievably dumb to make such a ridiculous reach.

@johntash@eviltoast.org
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Lol sorry, I’m probably not explaining it properly.

  • Corporations are required (by law in a lot of cases) to protect certain information
  • Corporations also have an interest to ensure their own property isn’t misused or abused

Corporations need a way to achieve those two points. Normally this is done by some sort of MITM corporate proxy and maybe some invasive spyware-like software on the machine itself.

Some people absolutely abuse this power and would have no problem reading your personal e-mail, or watching your desktop screen all day. I agree that this shouldn’t be a thing and they shouldn’t have access without some sort of strict approval process.

But, how is a corporation going to prove that you did or did not send a secure/private document on your work device through your personal e-mail? If you are using your personal email, it won’t go through the corporate mail server so they have to rely on either MITM proxies and logs, or something locally on the device. The alternative (no monitoring at all) would lead to situations where data is compromised and the company has no idea why or how, if they even are aware of it at all.

Similarly what if an employee uses their personal email to accidentally download a virus and that virus starts uploading all of the files on the device to a server somewhere? Without any sort of monitoring, that event could go undetected.

If there’s an alternative, I’d love to hear about it. But I’ll probably always stick to keeping work and personal data separate.

Okta (a cybersec company) literally just had a huge breach recently because an employee saved corporate log in credentials in his personal gmail account that got hacked. He accessed the personal email account from a work device.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/okta-breach-affected-all-customer-support-users/

There are other areas where the company policy also failed, but saving sensitive corporate data to a personal email account is what kicked it off, and why you don’t use work devices for personal matters, and vice versa.

Create a post

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more…


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We’ve tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the “official” Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other “Privacy Guides” communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don’t ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don’t repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don’t abuse our community’s willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

  • 1 user online
  • 1 user / day
  • 4 users / week
  • 45 users / month
  • 395 users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 675 Posts
  • 11.2K Comments
  • Modlog