> Your computer has a sysadmin account for the company, and probably not a sysadmin account for you.
I know that's the case some places, but I've never worked anywhere where that was the case. And that includes a company with 10k employees. It's nowhere near universal.
That is also much less of a restriction than it used to be: Most of us have personal computers on our body most of the time, as you point out.
But expectation of privacy is largely down to how you choose your society to be. Many countries have restrictions on what employers are legally able to do with that access for that reason. E.g. Norway has strict limitations on to what extent employers can even look at your corporate e-mail account without your consent because there is considered to be an extent of expectation of privacy there too, and tries to strike a balance between protecting that and protecting the needs of the employer.
A lot of Norwegian labour law around privacy boils down to whether employees have a legitimate reason for reducing the expectation of privacy, and how to minimize that invasion, rather than accepting that "you already have little expectation of privacy at work" is a valid excuse for eroding it further. Part of the rationale here is that people spend sufficient time at work that it is unrealistic to expect there to be no co-mingling of personal life and work, and so there is a need to create limited spheres of privacy even at work, and it is rare that this conflicts with legitimate employer concerns (and "you should spend 100% of your time exclusively on work tasks" is not considered legitimate) in ways that can't be reasonably resolved.
I find it troublesome how many people don't even question whether or not this kind of erosion of privacy serves legitimate purposes.
> At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person.
There is a very different dynamic there, though, which you can easily test: People have different levels of awareness of a person looking in their direction vs. a camera. If I had a manager standing behind me all the time, I'd quit.
A camera is better in some respects (you don't have someone standing there) and worse in some respects (it is actually there all the time and you don't know when someone is looking)
Whether or not it's truly invasive largely boils down to how it is handled. Active monitoring is very different from knowing someone might look at the recordings to look for evidence for in the case of specific types of events, for example.
I know that's the case some places, but I've never worked anywhere where that was the case. And that includes a company with 10k employees. It's nowhere near universal.
That is also much less of a restriction than it used to be: Most of us have personal computers on our body most of the time, as you point out.
But expectation of privacy is largely down to how you choose your society to be. Many countries have restrictions on what employers are legally able to do with that access for that reason. E.g. Norway has strict limitations on to what extent employers can even look at your corporate e-mail account without your consent because there is considered to be an extent of expectation of privacy there too, and tries to strike a balance between protecting that and protecting the needs of the employer.
A lot of Norwegian labour law around privacy boils down to whether employees have a legitimate reason for reducing the expectation of privacy, and how to minimize that invasion, rather than accepting that "you already have little expectation of privacy at work" is a valid excuse for eroding it further. Part of the rationale here is that people spend sufficient time at work that it is unrealistic to expect there to be no co-mingling of personal life and work, and so there is a need to create limited spheres of privacy even at work, and it is rare that this conflicts with legitimate employer concerns (and "you should spend 100% of your time exclusively on work tasks" is not considered legitimate) in ways that can't be reasonably resolved.
I find it troublesome how many people don't even question whether or not this kind of erosion of privacy serves legitimate purposes.
> At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person.
There is a very different dynamic there, though, which you can easily test: People have different levels of awareness of a person looking in their direction vs. a camera. If I had a manager standing behind me all the time, I'd quit.
A camera is better in some respects (you don't have someone standing there) and worse in some respects (it is actually there all the time and you don't know when someone is looking)
Whether or not it's truly invasive largely boils down to how it is handled. Active monitoring is very different from knowing someone might look at the recordings to look for evidence for in the case of specific types of events, for example.