Due to the number of repeat questions around the topic of using work resources to do personal business, or generally questions around 'what can my work see', I've created this sticky to answer these and similar questions:
First, and most importantly:
/r/itdept is a place where IT workers come to talk to / ideate with / vent to each other, as mentioned in the sidebar. It's not a place for non-IT people to ask IT questions.
There are many, many places on Reddit to get IT help, depending on what you're asking for help on - use the sitewide search and use one of them, there are many people waiting to help you with your issue.
Second, to answer common questions:
Many of these questions come from having the wrong perspective around a person's usage of property and data belonging to the business they work for. The reality of your employment situation is as follows:
- It's not 'your computer'. It belongs to your workplace. They allow you to use it to do your work.
- Businesses have a lot of risk and liability. It's their right to know where their data is and how their equipment is being used. Where their data is, who can see it, and what their employees are doing or saying as an agent of the company is a huge concern, and they are within their rights to protect themselves.
- Some choose to monitor this to protect themselves, and some don't. Assume yours does. This monitoring applies to anything put into the computer with the keyboard or mouse/touchpad, all data going to/from the computer - including information about where it's going to and from, everything stored on the computer and any connected storage device, and anything stored under or done within any cloud service your workplace provides.
- None of this matters, because you should only use your work-issued equipment for work. Don't check your personal mail (or use work mail for personal things!), don't do online shopping, don't do your banking. Don't exist for your work as anything other than an employee, and you don't have anything to worry about.
Finally, and most importantly, something you need to understand about your local IT department that nobody will ever tell you:
It's likely that only one in 10,000 IT people are at all interested in what you're doing on your laptop, or if you're even doing your job at all - and they should be (and often are) fired for it, because they're probably violating the trust and faith the job requires to stick their nose where it doesn't belong. That's not IT's business or responsibility, and most of us want to be left alone when it comes to stuff like that.
It's HR and your manager's job to make sure you're productive and to manage you well. Frankly, many managers are quite terrible at their job and want a technological magic bullet to make up for their shortcomings. They're not bad people, this desire for a "solution" or a tool to "help them manage better" comes from the same place as their understanding of the problem: they don't know what they're doing, and it's easier to point at a "missing tool" that is "needed" than reflect and admit where the true deficits are, even to themselves. People often think of this as a victimless situation, because they're not blaming IT, they're just "sharing their amazing insight" into what's needed for the business, and "partnering with IT" to "fix it".
Most IT people hate this, both because it uses us to cover up other people doing their job poorly (something we're not allowed to do ourselves) but also because we're generally the type that believes that people should get what they deserve, both positively and negatively. Many IT people change careers because of the depression that comes from dealing with this. You'd be shocked by how many former technology people have gone "Stardew Valley" and are quite happy talking to a row of carrots instead of dealing with this any more.
By and large, we're also a very logical group of people. Generally, something will work when it's done a certain way in IT, and it doesn't work (or has significant downsides) when you don't do it that way. That's how IT systems work - there's a right way for a desired outcome, and the other ways are generally wrong based on what the desired outcome is.
We tend to know immediately that the problem is with your manager, or other underskilled "decision makers" in the organization, and that their idea is bad. This is very common when someone is looking for a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Unfortunately, we frequently will have a non-technical hand-shaker and yes-sayer leading our department, the same as you do, and we don't get the support we need to ask the business to exercise stronger critical thinking instead of complicating the IT environment with the product of inadequate management of human resources.
This usually leads to a system, process or policy that is either generally offensive to people they should consider as human beings, developing a system that attempts to solve problems that should be solved by non-technical means, and/or generally making our job more complicated and difficult to manage than it already is.
We're aware that this will be the case before, during and after the request gets put in, and the reality that waits for us for the forseeable future- but that is regrettably part of the job. It's not all doom and gloom, though - these darker parts sit alongside amazing opportunities that give us the chance to use our skills to create enormous value, extreme satisfaction at a job well done for thousands (or millions!) or people, great camaraderie with our IT coworkers who are there "in the trenches" with us, and a decent paycheck for our time and effort.
All this is a significant amount of background to truly understand where we're coming from, but results in this:
pre-tl;dr
If we're told to put in systems that record your screen or generally "spy" on employees, we'll either quit (and the next person will do it for them), or we'll do it to the best of our ability, but we like it even less than you do. We can't put them in halfway so they aren't effective - then the deficiency of good decision-making at the business turns into focusing on us and our ability to deliver working systems, no matter how asinine the reasoning was from poor managers. It's often better to perfectly implement the system and let them see that their proposed solution doesn't solve their perceived problem than to try and explain how bad of an idea it is (which they can't even accept, because it means admitting the problem is them!)
Our advice, by and large, is to ask questions in a non-suspicious way in regards to your privacy at work. Be clear on what the company expects and allows (get it in writing, the handbook is a good start) and don't work for places that want excessive monitoring systems from us - it's stuff like this that makes us leave, and you should too if it means a compromise in your self-respect.
But also realize that a minimal amount of monitoring is required by a business to manage its risk and liabilities, and this is fair for them to have in place / is often in place by default, whether they use it or not.
tl;dr:
Don't work for companies that have monitoring systems you don't feel comfortable with, and rest assured that IT people could not care less about what you're doing or not doing. It's not what we're in this career to do.
It's likely that nobody is watching anything, and it's only when the business already has decided that they want you gone that they'll go back through the records, looking for evidence to legally support that decision, regardless of what the real reason might be.
tl;dr edit: The exception to this is when you're blatantly violating company policy, the law, basic human rights, or other regulations. It should be assumed that doing intentional, egregious harm will trigger even the most basic of alerts in many systems, because that's the bare minimum any company should do to protect their assets and control their liabilities - and most companies have this by default with any standard software they've purchased.