Personal computer - work VPN

Question

My employer provided VPN software on our personal computers (VPN Tracker 365). When logged in, would my employer have access to my desktop files/folders? I have no issue of having anything to hide, just general expectations and concerns about privacy.

Answer 1

It might, who knows?

You are installing a software on your computer. Except if you had the source of that software (that you audit, that is self-contained, etc.) and you compiled it yourself and you did the compilation on a trusted host with a trusted compiler (see the famous Thompson article on trust), you otherwise can not have any guarantee on what it is doing or not. If it is installed under an Administrator account/service (probably needed for a VPN), expect that it can do everything.

Even if you are installing things on your own computer and not one of your employer, you may still be mandated by some policies tied to your contract on what you can or can not do with your equipment using some of your employer resources (network, etc.).

If you would like to have some safeguards, you should use VMs or equivalent so that you can segregate your work from your non-work use cases on your own computer. Or equivalent technologies (ex: on Linux you have network and filesystem namespaces so you can restrict what a process sees on the system regarding files and network capabilities).

Answer 2

While it is true that theoretically if you install software on your computer, you have no idea what it may be doing, therefore your employer could be accessing your files; if you trust the VPN software to only provide a VPN, then no. A VPN by itself does not grant access to your files unless you deliberately put them in a network-shared location or allow remote login to your device over the VPN.

But it's probably worth looking into what the documented features of "VPN Tracker 365" may be. I'd certainly be a little uneasy installing pretty much anything with "Tracker" right in the name!