Bring Your Own Device Policy: Fill & Download for Free

I worked for a UK based company for about an year in Hyderabad. There they have a policy that an employee can opt for a laptop of their own (BYOD- bring your own device policy). We were given an option that, company will sponsor 50% or up to 60k INR for a MacBook Pro (I am an iOS application developer). Just after a written confirmation I went to nearest Apple Store and bought a MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch 256GB which costed me 1,49,500 INR (actually I paid 89,500 INR from my pocket rest of the money got credited to my account later from the company). I felt so happy with that policy…….. I believe that's the greatest perk I ever noticed/experienced.

When an employee is hired, there is a step in the process where they are given a stack of documents to sign that (anecdotally) I’ll venture maybe 1 in 1,000 actually read. One of the least understood (or read) is the notice that the company controls, collects and analyzes all communications, internet activity and data stored on company-owned or -managed devices and systems.This includes network traffic that flows across their servers. It’s safe to assume that mid-to-large employers are fully aware of the amount of on-the-clock time employees spend shopping, tweeting or watching YouTube, and know which employees are spending inordinate amounts of ‘company time’ shopping on Amazon rather than tackling assignments.This also include Bring Your Own Device policies— where employees are allowed to use their personal smartphone, tablet or laptop for business purposes. Companies don’t always ‘exploit’ the policy for nefarious surveillance purposes, but employers are within their rights to collect information like location data from your BYOD smartphone both on and off the clock.An example of where this can hurt employees is when they start to look for another job.If you email/Slack/message your supervisor and ask for a personal day off to attend to a family matter, but your device logs show you are accessing job-search sites and your location data suggests your aren’t at home or even within the radius of a competitor’s office, they know. This tends to make your boss cranky, and can adversely impact your employment to the point of losing your job.I disagree with this kind of intrusive surveillance, and the presumption of guilt employees face when they take steps to protect themselves by using encrypted tools like Signal, proxy servers or switching devices to Airplane Mode intrudes on the employee’s legitimate rights to privacy: you may not want your employer to know that you’re seeing a psychiatrist on your lunch hour, and they really have no reasonable expectation for you to disclose this (or not take steps to conceal it.)Workplace Privacy and Employee MonitoringPDF: https://www.privacyrights.org/printpdf/67553This is Your Wakeup Call on Employee Privacy

We can track everything that takes place on the networks we control. If you are using your own phone on the “bring-your-own-device” WiFi that we so graciously set up for you to use while you’re in the office, yes, we can track what you do on that network, because it’s our network.Now, even if you do not use the WiFi we provide but you let us install that little app we gave you so you can check your work email using your phone, well, that app also lets us track everything you do on your phone. (Did you forget that we told you that? It was on page 13 of the Information Services Policies and Procedures Manual we gave you when you signed on to work for us. Is this your signature on this form acknowledging that you were given a copy of that manual and agreed to be bound by everything therein, as long as you remain employed by our firm? Ok then.) By the way, when we set that up we also captured all the unique identifiers from your phone so that we can more readily track all of your activity.We do this to ensure that when confidential company information gets leaked, we’ll know exactly who was responsible and thus know who to fire and sue. (Also, it occasionally allows us to catch child molesters.)Don’t mess with corporate IT. We know way more than we let on. We just generally don’t talk about what we know.