Separating Electronic Business and Pleasure
My group at work is being provided new laptops to replace our old and outdated equipment that can no longer run out processor intensive programs.
It’s a nice perk to be issued a company laptop, and from the looks of it, fairly common place these days.
A subtle ping of my coworkers reveals that the cross-utilize their company issued laptops for personal use at home as well. And while that can seem like an indirect perk all together, I wonder if the move is all that wise.
The equipment is in fact, company property, and given the economic climate today it’s not out of the question to be relieved of ones duties at a moments notice, with or without cause.
Which should segue into the rhetorical question, is it smart to use your company computer for personal use?
Sure, answering web-based email may seem transparent enough, although you should be aware that even that data technically belongs to your company.
Banking, storing personal documents, family photos, music and contacts of the personal and business sort may leave you wishing you hadn’t when your IT department puts your account on lock down.
Typically when an employee is excused from their job, the first thing that happens is a complete wipe out of their computer. In a sales or marketing based position, emails may be retained for legal reasons, but other than that, the ones are flipped to zeros without any regard to what those bits and bytes really represent.
It is, after all, the companies data.
A couple suggestions for those who use a company laptop for personal use:
Save everything you don’t want to lose to a flash drive. Memory is cheap these days, and music files, contact lists and photos can easily be backed up onto portable media.
Clip that thumb drive to your key chain so you can’t leave work without it. You never know, this Friday might be your last.
Think about what data you could live without. Bank statements, phone lists, family photos probably should be secured outside of your companies network. At least make a copy every couple weeks.
Laptops are cheap and getting cheaper. Get one.
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With three different companies I used their laptops at home and at work, what I did was carry around a portable usb hard drive that was mine. I kept most of my docs in a few master folders and then every couple of weeks I would download everything to the drive. Worked great everytime I left a company, I had everything that I needed and it prevented me from buying any computers.
Also, learn to install CCleaner. It is a freeware program out on the web that I have found that effectively cleans all of the unwanted data like recycling bin, your internet leftovers, etc. Real effective at clearing up registry problems, too.
Also kept all pics on the hard drive.
I agree that using a work computer for personal stuff is foolish, and puts you at risk of losing that stuff when the computer is taken away. However, flash drives are risky in the other obvious sense in that they are easy to lose or steal. I’d suggest getting one with at least rudimentary encryption, but would recommend something robust like Iron Key – https://www.ironkey.com/