[PradeetPatel]

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I wonder if this is where they are going.

[piker]

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.

[lazide]

Hint: it’s also fiction

[PradeetPatel]

I wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.

[lodovic]

That domain is for sale. This whole thread sounds like one of these "I sell ai agents as a saas and make 30k/month" stories.

[lazide]

If that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.

[jaapz]

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

[ryandrake]

Whether they should or shouldn't, you have to expect that your company has root on your work device or at least some sort of corporate admin profile that gives them access to everything on the device and all attached peripherals. This has been pretty standard at IT / tech companies for as long as I've been in the workforce. I personally wouldn't do anything personal on a work computer, from sending personal E-mails all the way up to storing nudes on it. Why do that when a separate personal computer is cheap and solves the problem entirely?

EDIT: I remember, an example of this actually came up a while ago on HN. An Apple employee had to return a device unwiped, due to legal discovery, but the device had intimate pictures on it[1]. Oops! Don't do that, people.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241917

[satvikpendem]

On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.

[whateverboat]

This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.

[unmole]

I don't see how people using a work computer exclusively for work would lead to a shitty work culture, let alone lowered productivity.

[cyclopeanutopia]

Why not? How about a company-owned toilet? It's their property as well.

[satvikpendem]

You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.

[cyclopeanutopia]

This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.

TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.

[BoneShard]

I stopped doing any personal stuff on a work laptop long time ago, like 10+ years ago. There is absolutely nothing on my work laptop which is not work related. Working from home though helps, I always have my laptop next to me. Same with the phone, under no circumstances I will do anything work related on my personal phone (and yes I do have a company provided phone with MDM and etc).

[satvikpendem]

Consider, do they ever go on explicit websites on that computer? No? Because they know that's surveiled while a personal computer for the same purpose is not. As I said, people do know the difference and might do light personal things like googling something unrelated to work but wouldn't do e.g. banking on a work computer. If they do, well, it'll be their fault if they ever get fired for doing so.

The fact that you don't believe people who don't share your same opinion on mixing work and personal stuff are somehow not "real" is part of the problem.

[kaashif]

I'm not American or in America, but I wouldn't use a work laptop for anything personal.

I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?

[rebolek]

Maybe we should also call it labor camp.

[throwaway173738]

I often joke with my family about going back to the salt mine when I leave for work.

[the-peter]

I make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.

[kube-system]

It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.

100% of the people at my company use their computer for personal tasks, and this is permissible under our policies. Our company is fully BYOD and owns zero computers, and zero cell phones.

[AgentOrange1234]

That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.

Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.

Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.

[satvikpendem]

Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.

[lazide]

Bwahaha. The same protections the NSA has?

The ones on the ‘inside’ are doing to 500% of the time I’m sure

[rexpop]

I spend the majority of my adult life working, and you're telling me I should spend it surveilled?

[seanp2k2]

You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.

[rexpop]

I'm sorry, did God Almighty write the employee handbook?

[sho_hn]

In most civilized countries you absolutely do have significant rights to privacy on a work computer.

[xpe]

/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.

[euroderf]

> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?

[cyclopeanutopia]

Or toilets.

[satvikpendem]

If it's a work phone, yes they can.

[mulmen]

Yes? And by law so can all US phone companies.

[seanp2k2]

And thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin...

https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p...

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir...

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc...

https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...

[Frieren]

> Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

> I work at a tech firm in India

First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights.

You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.

[sebtron]

I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.

[eertami]

Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.

[type0]

> with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.

In many EU countries even if privacy protection is strong on paper, the settlement will be so low compared to US that you won't afford to take any vacation.

[ForHackernews]

I've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.

[sebtron]

Lucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.

[reaperducer]

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

There remains a thing called human dignity.

If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.

[trinsic2]

No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.

I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.

[saghm]

If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.

[futuraperdita]

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

[vinni2]

For what it’s worth I heard from a manager in Meta that they are doing this too.

[seanp2k2]

>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.

Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.

Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens.

More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense:

https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w...

https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire

https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/

[futuraperdita]

> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.

I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.

[jedbrown]

Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.

> Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...

[lazide]

Sure, and then DOGE exfiltrated their whistleblower database - which is 10x as intimidating.

[Reisen]

Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?

[Hamuko]

>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues

Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?

[downrightmike]

"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"

[Saline9515]

We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!

[IAmGraydon]

>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.

[nickvec]

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

[lazide]

Also, the agent doesn’t really work - but that doesn’t matter.

[Lihh27]

skills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.

[rimliu]

a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?

[throw-the-towel]

At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.

[izacus]

That doesn't mean it's suddenly ok to monitor every second of your life while you work.

[jmorenoamor]

That's incredibly creepy tbh

[duskdozer]

Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.

>I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.