Privacy At Work

[tongodeon]

In the United States employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If you're using company networks or computers for personal communication it's reasonable to expect that some of this data will be discovered by the company, at very least unintentionally. Maybe you're out sick one day and someone needs to check your $HOME or email account

Comments

[cdk]

SpectorPro can be configured to take screenshots in response to events and keywords. It still requires a human to review what it's captured, but it's not as time-intensive as just brute-forcing it with a VNC.

[kitos]

There's a good book out now on general work-place email advice. The website is http://thinkbeforeyousend.com/. (Disclaimer: I know about the book because they mention my company)

[xtingu]

If you or someone you love is still a Windows + IE user, may I suggest checking out Trackless.

boutell, our friendly purveyor of quality web resources since 1993, has created Trackless (or, "Tracklefs" if you're rwx or drjohn), which is a free app that erases your history better than anything else I've found.

From his site:
What does it do, exactly? Trackless removes URLs from the normally unreadable and invisible index.dat files in which Internet Explorer keeps its history information. Trackless removes all cookies (note: if you don't really want to delete your history and cookies... don't run this). Trackless also purges URLs from the "auto-complete" feature and removes temporary cached copies of pages. Trackless does not delete index.dat files; it surgically edits them to remove information about your personal browsing habits. Thanks to our "surgical" approach, there is no need to restart your computer after running Trackless.

[daakroth]

Another course of action for Windows users is to use a U3-Smart thumb drives. I've got all of my Firefox, Trillian, etc running off my 2gb Sandisk Cruzer Micro and nothing is left on the PC, so it's all nice.

www.u3.com

[tongodeon]

Is there a pointer to how to set this up? It was my understanding that even if you're running the binary off the USB drive the cache and other data will get stored locally.

[daakroth]

The software resides & runs on the drive. All data is stored on the drive with the exception of cache but you can install plugins and set your options so they get all cleaned out as soon you unplug.

All of the trillian data/logs/etc is on the drive also.

Not to mention there's plenty of security-oriented software for U3 like e-Capsule Private Browser, etc.

Best thing would be to get one and play around with them. U3 drives is pretty cheap. The 2gb model I got for $25 on sale a few months ago.

There's a list here: http://www.u3.com/smartdrives/default.aspx that lists which models come with what software pre-installed. I've got a Memorex and Sandisk, and I prefer the Sandisk myself. Lots of available apps is available for download for U3 and I believe there's also instructions out there on how to compile various things so they work on U3 drives.

[grza]

It was my understanding that there are certain versions of Firefox that are specifically modified so that they would keep all of their related files in a directory local to the application.

Check here: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

They also have some other applications there, including some IM-type stuff.

[anonymous]

Rule number one:

Don't work for assholes.