As much as I love google hate, the bigger problem is people thinking work devices are private. They are not. Your messages/thoughts/ideas belong to the organization.
Yeah this is the bigger issue here really. Fuck Google and their invasive bullshit, absolutely, but work devices should never be used for personal/private use, and vice versa. Keep that shit completely separate as much as possible.
Yup! Just cuz your employer isn’t physically there looking over your shoulder while using the device doesn’t mean they are oblivious to what you are doing on it.
And they pay for it, so it’s completely fine for them to track it, in my opinion. Use private phones, people.
You would be mistaken if you think that every work phone is paid for by the employer. A lot of companies have a BYOD policy and still require loading their restrictive bullshit onto it. I have worked at two places like this and I refused to let them do it, but most went along with it. The funniest part if that they still wanted me on the on call rotation, but wouldn’t pay for a decent device so they dug out an ancient Nextel phone for me to use. I have no idea how it still worked.
Good! That’s exactly how you should react to that request. BYOD is only okay if the company is subsidizing your monthly bill, even then it’s a grey area to me.
Yeah, I had no choice on needing a phone for bring on call, but being only able to receive calls or SMS really cut down on the nonsense heh.
I’ve actually never heard about this where I live, in Sweden. Thanks for sharing, even though it sounds both shitty and pretty scummy.
I’m glad to hear that the BYOD trend didn’t take off in every country. Many of the companies would act like they were doing you a favor so you didn’t have the “hassle” of carrying two phones around. Oh that is a hassle, but this was just them shoveling their costs onto the worker.
Private devices in general. I’ve seen people logged into their social media on company laptops as if the incognito window matters lol.
My old boss logged onto her private investment bank account on the work computers/network and bought and sold stock, for example. God knows what else she did. She got fired for using the company card for private purchases. Good fucking riddance. :D
People are so obtuse…
Suddenly, the perk of being given a phone at work is not as good as it might seem.
Since when is a work phone a perk. They have horrible battery performance, only function between 9 and 5 and call quality is absolute fuckin shit.
A work phone is a perk because it means you don’t have to install Teams, Slack, and a bunch of proprietary nonsense you’ve never heard of onto your personal phone.
Seriously, the number of tunnels they cut off in as soon as a call comes in is astounding.
Me over here having to provide my own work phone because BYOD. At least it’s my old phone I upgraded from, so the cost is already sunk.
another bullshit Forbes headline…
how many people would have clicked on this if the title had used the term “on your work phone” like the first sentence of the article does?
GrapheneOS. Use a work profile. Segregate your work from your personal information. As far as the employer is concerned, they have full control over your device. They can even send a wipe command to it and it would only affect the work partition, leaving your personal data alone.
My favorite tool for managing this is an app called Shelter. Graphene has robust profiling support, but I don’t want to have to swap in and out of something to see info. Shelter allows you to clone apps from your main profile to your work profile. You don’t even have to set up Google Play Services with an account if you don’t want.
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