[prepend]

Monitoring company devices is not spying on employees. It’s legal and every company does this.

If my company gives me a phone, it’s weird that they don’t take every piece of data and monetize it.

It’s spying if they harvest data from my private devices or my home. It’s not spying if they have cameras in the workplace where there is no expectation of privacy.

If I want privacy, I need to be an independent contractor and use my own equipment.

Otherwise it’s just petulant complaining about things that are willingly entered into. If I don’t want biometric data captured, I shouldn’t take a job that does that.

[viraptor]

Only some monitoring is legal and it needs to be linked to relevant explanations.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/30/labor-officials-found-that... specifically talks about the claims being about employees being coerced into joining such programs and into not using a separate private device.

> If I want privacy, I need to be an independent contractor and use my own equipment.

We're not in a cyberpunk megacorp dystopia (yet). You still have rights and can expect privacy in specific situations, even if you're employed by a big-corp. Check your actual rights, don't just defend what companies are doing - they don't pay you - they have their own lawyers for that.

[prepend]

We’ve been in a cyberpunk not-dystopia for decades. There is a lot of case law that there’s no expectation of privacy in the workplace. [0]

Employers can do stuff that is illegal for private citizens.

For example, employers can key log everything you do on your work equipment. Without your consent. They can video everything you do at work, without consent. They can keep the fingerprint you use to log in and keep the eye scan and biometric data for many purposes.

Note, I’m not defending this. Just stating facts. As they are useful facts and if I expect my employer to not do this then I need to confirm they have some practice in place to prevent it of their own volition because US law doesn’t prevent it.

I learned a lot about this when working on my org’s ssl MITM policy so it would not MITM for personal sites. While legally they could proxy and log bank logins and such, it is internal policy not to do this and to communicate to employees. Now employees can’t commit fraud with it or facilitate crimes (eg sell passwords) but they could do lame stuff like sell employee profile data (eg, prepend banks with XBank).

I only do work on work equipment. I keep a personal phone and personal laptop for any personal business.

If I didn’t want to be monitored in this way, I’d have to seek out a rare company and I’m not even sure to how to audit to make sure they actually adhere to their stated policies.

Note, this is only for employees on employer owned equipment. So I think it’s perfectly normal for Apple to log biometric data on test devices and use it for training. And to use all images on those devices for training purposes.

[0] https://www.justia.com/employment/hiring-employment-contract...

[viraptor]

> There is a lot of case law that there’s no expectation of privacy in the workplace. [0]

The link disagrees with you. You have less privacy at a workplace, but you still have rights. For example:

> They can video everything you do at work, without consent.

no, that's just not true and the article lists exceptions. Don't kill the nuance yet.