People today work remotely and in office. The line between personal and work tasks blurs more by the day. If you’re in front of a computer for most waking hour, then it’s normal to get attached to your regular PC.
Given enough time, people usually start performing personal tasks on work computers. In the beginning, it might just be checking personal emails on break. As time goes on, however, people wind up using their work computer for as many personal tasks as their paid work demands. This is a very bad idea, for potential consquences ranging from severe embarrassment to legal liability.
After surveying over 900 employees, results showed that only 30% replied that they never used their work PC for personal tasks. 70% admitted out loud to using their work computer for non-work reasons.
Some of the personal tasks that people perform on a work computer include:
- Reading and sending personal email
- Scanning news headlines
- Shopping online
- Online banking
- Checking social media
- Streaming music
- Streaming videos/movies
Mixing work and personal activities on the same computer never ends well. Regardless of convenience, mixing those two can cause a data breach at your company, possibly earning you a reprimand or costing your job.
Ensuring your work PC security means never doing the following.
Never Save Your Personal Passwords On The Browser
Browser password managers are really convenient, allowing people to auto-fill forms. However, what happens when you lose access to that browser and computer?
When the company owns the computer, the company can take it away at any time. They may replace it with no warning, take it in for repair, require upgrades, or even suddenly terminate the employee using it.
When someone new gets onto that work computer and you never signed out of the browser, now they have all your passwords. If they know how, they can even get into your account to transcribe them. All your cloud accounts just got breached.
Often, businesses want to get as much value as they can out of old equipment. Donations offer a tax write off. Therefore, companies will usually sell them or donate them to worthy causes. This leaves all your passwords vulnerable if the PC wasn’t wiped properly.
Never Store Personal Data
It’s easy to get in the habit of storing personal data on your work computer, especially if your home PC doesn’t have a lot of storage space. But this is a bad habit and leaves you wide open to a couple of major problems:
Most people store personal data on home computers. Once in that habit, it’s easy to also use work PCs for the same purpose. Doing so presents some excruciating consequences, though.
- Loss of your files: Remember talking about losing access to a work PC? Personal files are gone forever too.
- Company-accessible personal files: Companies often backup their own computers to protect against data loss. They have every right and technical capacity to do so. So, personal photos or files that you didn’t mean to become common knowledge just did. Whether it’s your vacation photos or your journal, don’t give access to the business you work for.
Don’t Visit Dubious Websites
Companies have the right to monitor any of your activities on their network, using their equipment. Assume your boss can watch you on the Internet at all times. Businesses often use cybersecurity measures, such as DNS filtering, to protect against phishing websites.
Dubious or sketchy websites are often phishing websites. They’ll usually flag as dangerous to security, which draws a human’s attention.
Just presume that your boss, or your boss’s boss, is watching over your shoulder the entire time you’re on a work computer. It’s just safer that way, for the company and for you.
Don’t Let Other People Use Your Computer.
Working remotely brings challenges that office work doesn’t. One of them is family or friends asking to use your work PC for their own reasons. Business provided computers are often more powerful and better supplied in terms of software than home computers. Family and friends frequently want more access to better computing power.
But allowing anyone else to use your work computer could constitute a compliance breach of data protection regulations that your company needs to adhere to.
However, your company will rightfully get upset over it. Allowing non-employees to use your work computer can constitute a compliance breach of data protection regulations that your business needs to adhere to. Protected personal information of clients is no joke.
If the personal data of customers or employees COULD be accessed by someone not authorized, the company you work for can face a high penalty.
How many people are well-versed in cybersecurity? Anybody who isn’t familiar can end up visiting a phishing website and infecting the work drive, which can populate the system through the company cloud. That means that you, the registered authorized user of that computer, are now responsible for that breach.
At least 20% of companies suffered a data breach during the pandemic because of a remote worker.
Don’t Turn Off Apps And Backups The Company Installed
When you’re working and suddenly everything slows to a crawl due to an automatic backup of an app or data, it’s really tempting to shut the backup process off. However, doing so can leave the data on the work computer unprotected and unrecoverable due to a hard drive crash or cyberinfection.
If the company’s backups are just too much of an impediment, it’s always better to talk to the company’s IT team to reschedule those around your working day than shut them off yourself. That way you’re not liable.
Conclusion
It’s important to get into the right headspace for both work and personal computers. Keeping them separate in context and use keeps you, the user, safe. It also minimizes risk to the company you work for.
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