0

i get on hangouts sometimes when i got nothing goin on at work . just wanted to see if anyone could help me in knowing if my work knows im on hangouts if i dont download anything and use an incognito window . appreciate the help .

Brock
  • 1
  • Do you use office network? Do you use Hangouts on a device provided by your employer? – pri Oct 24 '16 at 04:10
  • internet explorer and its on a work computer . but never anything bad on it . (porn) whatever else you could think of . – Brock Oct 24 '16 at 04:11
  • Yes, they can totally track all your activity. – pri Oct 24 '16 at 04:14
  • well ill stop that then , appreciate the help – Brock Oct 24 '16 at 04:14
  • probably not. it depends much more on who at your work is looking than what can be detected. incognito actually helps quite a bit, since it prevents a later hard drive scan from finding the activity. monitoring a network in real time is harder and less common. – dandavis Oct 25 '16 at 17:33

1 Answers1

2

Incognito mode does nothing to obscure your network traffic, so its contents and recipient are always apparent.

Supposing that you use a HTTPS encrypted connection, the contents would theoretically be obscured... but not the recipient. In this case they might be able to guess that you are chatting by what domains that you request information from, say a bunch of requests to hangouts.google.com. Then again, someone would probably need to be looking. You might be able to claim it is a side effect of simply logging into gmail.

If your employer is more draconian they might MITM all HTTPS traffic with a "in house" root certificate on their computers. In this case they could see everything you say, and have a product that likely captures such statistics.

They may even install monitoring software on the computers that spies on what you do directly, possibly even viewing the screen or capturing keystrokes.

In summary, if it really matters, they can possibly tell, and you really should not use hangouts.

They have no idea what you do on your phone over a cellular data plan...

trognanders
  • 2,925
  • 1
  • 11
  • 12
  • so as long as noone is looking then there shouldnt be any issues ? – Brock Oct 24 '16 at 04:25
  • I think that it is always the case that you are safe if nobody is looking. The rub with that is that you can not usually tell when someone is. On a company computer in a company network they _really might be looking_. – trognanders Oct 24 '16 at 04:49
  • 2
    @brock "As long as none is looking" during the operation *or after, during the logs retention time frame*. – Shlublu Oct 24 '16 at 06:38