Not that you guys need the reminder, but your work sees all your browser history and you may not even be able to delete it if you wanted to
Never do anything on work machines/networks you don't want to have to explain to hr/legal.
Sr. Systems Admin here. IT does not give 2 shits about what you browse UNLESS something is reported or something trips our Alerts (has to be something major like Child Porn).
We don't sit there and actively monitor and watch what you are browsing. We investigate when something is reported by a worker or an Alert/Filter gets tripped
HR also doesn't know unless we tell them.
Yeah, but the it's a good rule anyway, for some of the same reasons as the "Don't put it in an email if you wouldn't want it read aloud in a deposition" rule.
Absolutely. Everyone could use that reminder
Everybody has a cell phone nowadays. There's no excuse not to use your cell phone for private stuff. In fact don't use the company Wi-Fi. You must use the company Wi-Fi then you must use a VPN
But no excuse anymore not to use your phone, you don't need to use the word computer to browse, send emails, flirt, whatever
Everybody has a cell phone
All of my colleagues have work provided phones and laptops. They do all their personal shit on these devices (they don't have their own)
They think i'm a huge weirdo for having my own personal devices.... "Why waste money? Work gives us computer/phone... Lol, you carry two phones like a drug dealer?"
Just tell them "I don't want to spend company's resources for my own private life."
The only way is to give them back that guilt and fear they are feeling.
Hustlah 4 lyfe
I mean if all of them have them and use them, then i would definitely see you as a weirdo.
If a company would have fired someone for what the searched on a company computer, everyone would know by now.
Are there even these cases?
Don't most work Wifi networks prevent VPN use?
This has not been my experience
Mine does. They also keep an eye on it because I had gotten through it and that only worked a few days before it was blocked too. Didn't want to press my luck after that.
No.
where the hell do you work dude
Not sure why you're down voted. Yes some definitely do. You could get around it by hosting your own VPN on 443 or something but some do lock it down.
Their network, their rules. Makes sense.
And if you don't have a VPN set up, use Tor on your phone:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.torproject.torbrowser
That's fair, bur if your not using a VPN just don't connect to wifi at all. Too easy to make a mistake
The Tor website provides .apk files for Android, and there is an F-Droid release too. https://www.torproject.org/download/#android
Guardian Repo on FDroid... preinstalled
You must use the company Wi-Fi then you must use a VPN
The company VPN or the client VPN, sadly
I mean if your personal device is attached to a work network use a always on personal VPN.
If you can't for whatever reason then don't connect to the wifi!
They see and scan all traffic, even what doesn't go through the browser.
No one should use work laptops other than for work
Most just monitor your browsing through the Antivirus.
Since they don't want you visiting porn or malware websites on the corporate network, for good reasons.
Of course they can, they literally own the machine. You don't own it, so don't treat it like it's your own private job hunting platform or porn viewer.
Anyone that uses work equipment for personal stuff deserves to be found out
Your work can also read your private Slack messages. You have been warned.
I was the slack admin. We could not see private messages of clients. We could see company wide channels.
Are they really called private messages? They should just be direct messages
It actually depends on what tier of Slack license the company uses. Private is a black hole for anything short of Enterprise Grid, unless they reset your password and login as you, obviously doable but not at all subtle.
I used TOR at work once, to download some RPMs. Corp IT had a fucking meltdown
I can't imagine why
Why would you download RPMs from a browser, to a work PC, and do they use RHEL?
Some of our servers used RHEL, and were airgapped, so I had to use TOR because they blocked the site (rpm.pbone I think)and then sneakernet that shit.
I worked in security and trained all our staff on how to use Tor. Good data hygiene is important around the office.
Also Onion Share is the best way to securely share large sensitive files between users
Hmm, no Onionshare is for anonymity, Wormhole or Syncthing are good for security, anything AES basically. You are simply using random Tor servers to share files withing a company...
Until you get asked by HR why you're breaking their policies by clearing history and why you're doing it. If it's a work device that's not yours, don't expect privacy. It's their property.
They don't need the computer to see everywhere you've gone. I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for clearing their history, but lots of people who have had problems visiting questionable sites.
You underestimate just how dumb some corporate policies are lol. Even if you are completely right.
When I turn on my pc I get a prompt saying "this computer is managed by your organization, expect no privacy"
Sadly this.
Any personal matters I may have attended to during work hours were done on a personal device, through a VPN, preferably borrowing some other WiFi signal than one run by any company I work for.
If its even more personal, just drop WiFi I don't control all together. Either use the phones data plan for 10 minutes, or tether it to a computer and do the same.
That's not how it works in civilized countries that provide worker's rights by law
Unfortunately, words on paper frequently fail to prevent organizations, public of private, from doing things they are technically not allowed to do. See the security state apparatus of any of the nations around the world including the 5, 9 and 14 eyes, or any number of tech companies that claim and market privacy respective policies only for people to uncover later that what they pitch publicly diverges in spirit from what they do or what is in the actual terms of service.
Hopefully if people find their employer going outside the bounds of the contract they can catch it, catalog it and hold them to account. Accountability can often be tricky and costly though.
So... not the United States. France, maybe? Germany?
This, but it won't matter if you delete history. They know anyway if the want, and can enable logging it if they choose.
I work in cybersec - I’m not going to speak for all businesses or individuals but I will give you my perspective.
Sometimes we need to see browser history to help with timeline correlation, it’s mainly to see “how did this file get here, was it downloaded etc.
Sometimes the investigators need to check out the things they need to check out, BUT
BUT
It needs to be done precisely and sparingly where needed only. This means instead of going through the entire history file, or doing unrelated correlation work (spying on you without cause) you are going to only grab specific timeframes from things you suspect explicitly to prevent any overreach. It’s a tricky balance to hold but also why it’s so important for people in tech to be privacy advocates as well.
There’s a difference between searching for answers to a problem that arose and looking for/predicting problems (thought crime detected!)
I also work in cybersecurity. Second everything this person said.
This thread is a good reminder, because at many organizations HR / management can and will look at your browser history (and computer activity in general) as a method of monitoring performance and staying in control.
But at my organization, we have never once looked at anyone's browser history (and I know that HR hasn't because they would have to go through us). We certainly could if we were asked to and we would if there was an incident (what we would care about is sensitive / confidential information getting leaked or suspicious activity on the network using a specific person's credentials, suggesting those credentials may be compromised). But in almost 2 years (we're a startup in the aerospace electronics sector) we have never once had cause to do that and we have a philosophy that happy relaxed employees who feel trusted by their employer are the kinds of employees that we want, so we wouldn't intrude that way without cause ever.
I third(?) this. Security and IT teams are too busy to be monitoring your everyday habits. Sure, they can see your history if they wanted to, but they won’t unless there is an appropriate justification to do so, and it’s usually triggered by an incident or HR. There also stricit rules with doing so because employees still have the right to their own privacy. It’s not like HR can just go over to the security guy and ask them to pull someone’s browsing history.
Another Cybersec worker here, and I'll broadly agree with all this. That said, I'd also point out that, depending on your site setup, the browser history may be nothing more than another place to correlate information we have from elsewhere.
Several sites I have been at have used Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software which automagically records (and possibly blocks) data moving into and out of the environment. This can be very detailed, to the point of knowing when someone copy/pastes data to a web form. I've also been at sites which sniff web traffic at the firewall and record full pcaps and extract metadata for quick analysis. So yes, for those not aware, deleting browser history or using "in private" browsing or other steps to avoid us seeing your porn browsing, may not be as effective as you think.
All that said, I've never been on a Cybersec team which has had enough time to really care about porn browsing, so long as you are not putting the network at risk. And, so long as HR/Management doesn't tell us to care. We have better things to spend our time on.
Lastly, if you don't want us seeing it, don't so it on a work computer. Look, we have lots of ways to see what you are doing. Just, do that stuff at home, on your own hardware. And leave the work computer for work. Writing up misuse reports is something I really hate doing.
I agree with you completely
Same for our company, and all companies whose security folks I've had a chat with. We don't give a fuck what you do on your computer. Almost all security folks are into privacy themselves, additionally to simply not having the time to look at people's browser history or traffic or whatever.
Yes, we have the option to collect data. No, we don't look at it unless there is a very good reason to do so. And we protect that data, HR or whoever can't just have it if they feel like taking a look. There is a process to protect the data, because that means protecting the company.
Your security team is not the enemy.
your work sees all your browser history
Possibly, if they've bothered to configure their machines that way. And only on the browsers they've configured that way and only on their machines.
Also, please don't assume that your work operates the same way as everyone else's work.
I'm not on the IT team but have elevated permissions. I can dial into any of my subordinates computers "invisibility" I might add, and watch their screen. I can copy data remotely. It'll take me a few minutes to grab an image of their computer "for backup" reasons, restore it on another computer, and then safely view their history.
By invisibility, I still leave log traces on their computer.
I'm not going to, because wtf. But I totally do have that power.
Oh no, my employer might find out I'm looking for other jobs after being overloaded for a year and a half and constantly having my concerns/feedback/process improvement initiatives brushed aside.
I have been hinting to my manager for 6-9 months that he needs to move part of my workload elsewhere so that I can focus and actually achieve something. To think, all it took was for me to tell him straight that I was unhappy and unfulfilled to the point that I was considering resigning. Suddenly he's all apologies and let's make changes because you're kind of vital and we don't want to lose you.
Shot, i regularly browse jobs websites even though Im not looking to change jobs again soon. Just to keep them guessing.
I’m an infrastructure analyst and at my workplace I implement such rules for specific reasons: 1) we need to be able to have evidence should an employee act maliciously with a company device. We do also monitor all queries but it’s passive. We can drill into your browsing history in great detail but won’t unless we have to (speaking personally here as I follow the code). 2) people will do dumb shit. And will lie to get support. Now, having been on the other end of a support ticket, I get it. Unless you lie a little, you may not get support promptly. Therefore, it’s part of my job to check what’s the lie and what’s the actual issue, which includes being able to see the download history. I would not be surprised if malware is accidentally downloaded and then it autonomously removes itself from the download history as It has happened before. Strictly speaking, this is done for both your safety as well as that of the company. And generally speaking, you should NEVER use your work laptop/phone/iPad for personal use because of all of the above.
I use my personal laptop at work, no issues. Employer can't see what I'm doing which is the way it should be.
If they don't trust me, don't hire me then.
I would never work anywhere where people like you can watch what I'm doing. Luckily I'm in IT so I choose where I work.
I despise companies who don't give employees privacy. The reasons you gave means nothing. You can always argue for anything to protect the company. Who protects the employees?
Safest for the company would be if you have employees in small cells being watched by guards around the clock. That would be really good for the company.
If you've connected your personal laptop to your work wifi, they 100% can see all your browsing history (specifically whats passed through their network).
Hell, I only run a simple homelab and I can see the exact traffic/browsing history of every device on my home network. I'm only tracking via dns traffic, but your https traffic can even be intercepted and decrypted pretty easily. So don't even trust that.
This doesn't require installing anything on your device to fully monitor you.
I hear you, and fully get where you’re coming from. I work in the finance industry and we have auditors to answer to as well as a ridiculous number of compliance regulations we have to abide by. Not every business is the same. I’m personally on the no-trust policy when you have more than 50 users to manage but it also depend on company policy. No one is saying you can’t use your personal device at work. We don’t monitor the guest Wi-Fi in any way specifically because that would be an invasion of privacy. I was referring specifically to using a work device, managed by the business, for personal use. The employee is protected by being briefed during first day induction of he does and don’t with regards to the equipment that is provided to them to do their job. Their personal privacy is not infringed upon as there is a clear agreement about what is expected from them. By the way, I’m in the uk (not sure if relevant).
No. The way it should be is using a work-issue laptop at work, but provisioned by you.
So only watch mainstream porn on work computers, got it.
I've always assumed work will be looking at the browser history. Anyone who assumes they won't is an idiot.
Softcore is expressly permitted in the IT policy.
Those IT guys need to get off as well you know.
Forget chrome management. Any IT shop worth their salt is protecting their egress with a proxy, explicitly or transparently set.
Don't browse the net on your employer's network or devices. Use your phone. Get on 4G/5G.
I mean, MS can literally track you between Windows installs, as long as you're on the same hardware. No surprises here.
How? Is there a way to mitigate this?
No not really. I mean you could never connect to the internet I guess. But that's the best mitigation there is as long as your using windows. Or run it in a VM?
So you can understand how this works, each device in your computer has a uid or hid, a unique id, or hardware id. This remains consisten as long as you have the hardware. Things that have this are like hard drives pcie cards, etc.
There's also just the fundamental unique ways your PC is built. Of all windows users how many have an Nvidia card? 90% of those 90% how many have the same drive configuration. 5% of those how many are running Intel CPU. Etc etc...
You are sadly very unique.
Theclouds it is your friend trust me bro
Anyone know exactly what they could see if you're on a personal device but work-wifi?
Usually the websites and apps you use, but not what specific page you visit and it's content.
If you for example visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States they could see that you visited https://en.wikipedia.org/ but nothing more.
This is assuming that the website is encrypted (it starts with https://, not http://), which nowadays luckily most websites are. Otherwise they can see the specific page, it's content and most likely also all information you input on that page.
Every URL visited minimum unless you are going to an encrypted VPN outside their network first, then they will still see the network traffic to that vpn . I Know someone that got caught redditing on work wifi. granted they also had their device name set to use their name in it... so some of that is on them
My work has a 100% mandatory vpn and mitm proxy for ssl scanning. I just use parsec to view my laptop from my desktop and browse what I want on my actual personal computer
My work has a 100% mandatory vpn and mitm proxy for ssl scanning
These are worse than useless. They are anti safety. If this box or its private keys get compromised ALL tls traffic of all employees is immediately plaintext.
Any company that buys one of these appliances from mcafee or whatever is asking for it (losing most/all their secrets)
Oh I 1000% agree. But you try to convince my opsec colleagues
Luckily my work hasn't disabled the remote desktop application protocol. So I do the same, but without parsec.
Can't install parsec on the work computer, and the web app displays a black screen.
I'm on Ubuntu at work! The only employee on Linux at a tech company of >150 people! (Where are my Linux nerds?)
I'm using it, as well as my boss!
I’m in a company that uses Microsoft stuff, but I use a lot of fedora and Linux mint in VMs. The latter is based off Ubuntu at least!
It’s actually kind of nice to be able to save the state of my VM since forced restarts are so infrequent.
I'm in the process of convincing my management to switch to Linux. The most important thing to them is having a way to remotely delete the pc in case it's stolen. Does someone know of a solution in Linux for that?
if you don't have your personal browsing using a private profile of a secondary browser which you know you can delete, you are doing it wrong.
That might not be enough. I could monitor that on all the devices I manage, if I need to. There are tools to dump browsing info as it's being committed, or it's easy to pipe all the traffic from your machine through a VPN to a firewall I manage with a trusted cert injection into your device and inspect the traffic in transit. If you don't want your employer to see what your up to, don't use their infrastructure.
Well, yeah, if I worked at home I would use my personal computer for personal things and the workstation for work, it would be pristine. But alas, in the office there's so much time I can spend pretending that I'm working because I finished my tasks before I implode.
Some risks are necessary :)
It's not really about IT not knowing, but about being discreet enough that your boss doesn't see your personal accounts logged in or even worse, to have two chrome profiles, both with obscure names, press the wrong one and to share the screen of saved tabs with Facebook, Instagram, pornhub.... Yeah I've seen those bookmarks.
It's... Wtf... If you're going to be that deranged, at the very least be discreet... Sigh.
As an IT administrator, if your org has GPOs controlling if you can delete your browsing history or not, there is no chance you will be able to install a second browser without admin credentials.
Yeah, I can still see that activity. You're still doing it wrong.
Personal device not on corporate network or you're doing it wrong.
Sure but people see that you are on the phone while the IT people don't really care what you do and by bosses aren't checking those logs so idc. it's about being discreet on some layers.
If I were at home I wouldn't need to do anything to hide it since I would use my pc but since I'm in the office I have to get creative.
Also, 5hisbpost was 7 days old :)
Not my work.
What are you talking about? They definitely dont see what I browse in a whonix Qube..
Well, since I am IT, I am not about go to snitch on myself.
Only tangentially relevant, human beings get along better with their agenda (that is, are more productive) when they're freely allowed to check email and their lemmy feeds, shop on Amazon and whatever other social media stuff they do. In fact, studies have shown an improvement when they drag overly-focused clerks to their mandated coffee breaks (actual coffee optional).
So if you're getting into trouble for chatting with your kids, or answering emails or resupplying your household with dog food, that might be an indicator your work environment is toxic and you might want to keep looking out for better offers.
Also when game dev teams are crunched, their productivity drops below 50%. When they're crunched for more than two weeks, it drops below 10%. So don't crunch your devs.
Wow, didn't know that is possible. Is it same behavior with other browsers?
Same can be said for any browser, any app, any connection while on the employers network IF they wished to monitor it. Even if you were able to delete all local browsing history and used private browsing, your employer would still be able to know every site you visit if they wished.
If you've authenticated with your credentials on the device, IT is able to see IPs visited and DNS queries and has access to all sorts of network tools to track, shape and otherwise manage your activity.
It's best to assume that nothing you do on your employers network, even when logging into their corporate VPN from a personal device, is private.
I'm always shocked by privacy conscious people who do not have complete segregation of work and personal equipment and devices.
They can monitor anything they want.
They could even force you to connect to a mainframe instead of your own computer in order to work, and only allow you to click on 3 allowed buttons if they wanted to.
It is their hardware, they can do what they want.
I won't even connect to a wireless network at work with my phone without VPNing to my home network to browse. People use their work computers to browse for personal reasons? They are all.
What about private browsing or running a Firefox portable exe?
No, no, no. Private browsing isn't private like that. Your ISP and network adminstrator (in this case your employer) can still see every website you access. This is usually explained on the "New private tab" on browsers.
We record network traffic, not data from your browser. We can see every URL any device on the network hits, regardless if the traffic comes from a browser or even a phone app.
How is this with mobile devices from your employer. I have a company iPhone and understand that there is a certain “space” on the phone which is controlled by the company, mostly all the Microsoft 365 apps (so, for example it is not possible to copy/paste stuff between MS and non-MS apps).
However, for the rest I would assume that all the other traffic does not go through company servers (probably no traffic at all, as I usually have a local IP), and that they can’t see what I am doing in my other apps. Otherwise they could spy on all my transactions I do in my banking apps for example. But AFAIK iOS apps are pretty much sandboxed anyway.
This might be different on my company PC / Laptop, though.
They can see what IPs you connect to, doesn't matter what browser you use or if the connection is made from a browser at all
Anything on a work computer, or on a work network, you have to assume is recorded by the office
"Tor browser bundle" is the version of Firefox that doesn't reveal browsing data to the local network.
The use of Tor does show up on the network. The protocol is known and understood, and has been in the detection sets of pretty much every layer 7 filtering product for the last ten or eleven years. What, exactly, is being accessed is largely concealed (but traffic patterns give away a reasonably broad picture of what's happening).
You can use Tor and your IT won't be able to see what you're browsing. They will be able to see that you're using Tor, and might get grumpy about that, though.
I mean it's not blocked, but if you're connected to their network, they can still see your traffic if they wanted to.
Yes of course. But OP is asking about Browsing history, which is basically the only think private browsing can do
Private browsing is a fig leaf at best.
Portable Firefox is hit or miss, depending upon the work environment. It'll definitely show up in file system monitoring, might show up in the logs of the border proxy as an unexpected user agent. The initial download will definitely show up. Removable media might or might not, depending on how group policy is set up.
Private mode is absolutely not private at work even if it's enabled. They see everything you access with their network and know exactly where the traffic is coming from and going to.
I mean yes it can be locked. It can all be controlled by the group policy.
But either way, they can monitor all network traffic going through their network.
If allowed, doesn't DoH/DoT mitigate this issue?
Not if your employer has installed a root CA on your machine, enabling them to man-in-the-middle all your TLS connections.
Oh that's a thing? That's kinda frightening
For US government employees USAJobs is probably one of the most accessed websites.
Also in Google searches, if you click the vertical ... next to the URL on results, click the down arrow in the pop-up, and click Cached you can likely access a version of the website your white/blacklist service doesn't block. If there are SFW sites you need access to. Generally all scripts are disabled, though.
you don't know shit about my work fuck you!