Legal expert says court ruling in case where information accessed on Mecrus work laptop confirms ‘Australians still don’t have a right to privacy’
4dpuzzle
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These companies dig up everything from a prospective employee’s past, starting from childhood. Things that you said come back to bite you, even if you got wiser and changed your stance. But companies get to pull shit like this without consequences.

There should be a public blacklist database with every company and their dirty infractions like these. That way, at least very competent and desirable candidates can avoid them and look for better jobs.

@JamesWords@lemmy.nz
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Bad but not surprising. Unlike many other privacy laws, Australia’s has an exception for employer access https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/more-privacy-rights/employment#

@b0rlax@beehaw.org
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Easy solution, stop using company property for personal things.

Madzikanda had used his work laptop for personal activity, including saving his passwords for online banking, emailing from his personal account and accessing his online cloud storage.

Work device, work stuff

Personal device, personal stuff

Deceptichum
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Fucking pathetic.

I suppose when I enter company property they also have the right to do an anal cavity search on me because I am on company property after all.

flatbield
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Keep in mind that he was using a company device. Just do not do that. Similarly never use personal device for work. Sumilarly do not leave email on the server. This has always been the thing at least in the US.

Deceptichum
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

@BurningRiver@beehaw.org
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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.

AutoTL;DR
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This is the best summary I could come up with:


Shayano Madzikanda was suspended from his job at the mining industry company Mecrus in June 2019 and was ordered to surrender his work laptop.

In a complaint to the information commissioner made in 2019, he alleged that his iCloud and personal email accounts had been accessed by his employer.

But Madzikanda claimed his employer could only have known that by reading the contents of his personal emails and accessing information from his iCloud account.

Separately, he settled with his employer through the Fair Work Commission, including a provision that his personal property be returned.

The company denied it had used personal information saved on the laptop to access his online accounts, and provided IT policies dating back to 2013.

David Vaile, the privacy and surveillance stream lead at the University of New South Wales’s Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation, said: “The judgment is [unhelpful] for settling the law on this point – a consequence of the fact that a victim can’t directly litigate their legal claim, and that, as the court confirms, at present Australians still thus don’t have a ‘right’ to privacy, only a right to complain to a regulator who can, as this judgment confirms, take advantage of a wide range of justifications to do nothing if they feel like it with minimal court oversight.”


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