I smell serious Privacy concern just in this statement. Could company do that? I wonder why that engineer still working for that company if he is so good & company is playing all these tricks.
That's an interesting and informative read, however one line did catch my eye, and increase my background level of despair at the general maths/stats level of the wider population:
> An overwhelming majority of employers, 48 percent or so
I agree; the most charitable inference is that the 48% inluded the largest employers, and thus covered "an overwhelming majority" of employees - but it would have been so much better if they had said that specifically, and as it is, such an inference is pure speculation.
I took the parent question to be asking about where the (personal privacy) line falls:
- Can an employer search a personal laptop (BYOD)?
- What about a personal Dropbox account? Personal emails? What if they are only in the cloud, and not on the device?
- Do these answers change if there are logs showing these services were accessed with a company device during work hours?
- Could they look in his personal laptop bag if they suspected he had a USB drive with the information inside?
These are generally very locality-specific and dependent on the various employment agreements, codes of conduct, etc. that the employee signed, so in general it's not very informative to speculate on where those lines are drawn.
However, I do think these are useful questions that any employee should be able to answer for themselves about their own current employer, if only so that they're cognizant of their rights.
