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I have a suspicion that my employer is misusing their work monitoring and remote access software to check my online activity outside of work.

I have the software installed on my personal machine as I occasionally work from home and require remote access to my work PC. I am worried that they are illegally monitoring me, do they have the legal right to do this?

If they were deemed to have been snooping on my records illegally, what would the implications be if proven guilty?

Many thanks in advance.

carteruk
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is purely a legal question, i.e. are they legally allowed to monitor you. Please ask such questions at [law.se] but don't forget to add essential information like the country you live in since laws differ in the world. – Steffen Ullrich Oct 25 '18 at 04:28
  • Possible duplicate of [Can my employer see what I do on the internet when I am connected to the company network?](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/142803/can-my-employer-see-what-i-do-on-the-internet-when-i-am-connected-to-the-company) – kasperd Oct 29 '18 at 10:14

2 Answers2

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The question of whether what they're doing is legal will very much depend on the country you are in as laws vary from place to place.

As a general piece of advice, you might want to review your terms of employment and any company policies to do with monitoring. It's possible that they'll lay out what steps they can/will take there.

If you don't trust them then it's probably best not to run their software on your machine. If you have to work from home you could request they provide you with a corporate laptop to do the work on, to avoid having to install their software on your machine.

Rory McCune
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  • I’m in the UK. I’m keen to find out what the penealty would be for the person responsible for monitoring my device? – carteruk Oct 25 '18 at 16:52
  • I'll preface this with "I am not a lawyer" and you should get legal advice, in the UK I'd recommend speaking to Citizens advice potentially. That said there are laws , e.g. the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and also GDPR which control how companies make use of personal data. In principle it seems unlikely that **if** they're monitoring non-work related personal data from a system they don't own that would be compliant with those laws. All that said, really the best advice would be speak to a lawyer. – Rory McCune Oct 25 '18 at 16:57
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As Rory McCune said, I believe the answer to this question varies strongly depending on factors like location and contracts or paperwork you may have signed, etc.* It sounds like your best bet may simply be to seek counsel from an attorney. Good luck!

*Also, for good measure I should say that I'm not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about here.

securityOrange
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