Whether it’s buying groceries online or downloading porn, your company can track your data. Here’s what you should definitely not do on your office PC.
Porn’s the obvious one
Just because you’re opening the website in the Incognito mode of your browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc.), or it’s really late in the night, or you’re in another country, don’t think you’ll get away with browsing porn on company devices, even if you open the site for a few minutes. “Any inappropriate website, especially porn sites, will get you fired,” says Chaturvedi. Sometimes, you might have to face legal action too.
Don’t connect a USB
Never connect an external hard drive or a USB to the office PC that is connected to the company’s network, even if it is to only transfer your favourite music on to the device or to transfer files to take back home. Anything that can bring or transfer data from outside the network, such as USBs, CDs and Bluetooth, is a threat to the company—it could bring in a deadly virus, leak sensitive data to outsiders or transfer illegal data to the machine, making the company vulnerable to a lawsuit, says Chandrachoodan. “Usually, the company admin would have a software in your laptop that would alert them when a USB drive is plugged in. If you do, they would typically want to know what you did with it,” he adds.