Working in high-tech. A few days ago I noticed a weird program running on my machine just called “logger”. Sounds weird, right? Immediately I fear that I have been infected with some malware, though I am unsure how it happened.
So I go to our company chat to confess, only to see another guy already posted asking about the same thing. 10 minutes later, 6 other people have chimed in and said they also have the same thing running. Radio silence from the security guys for about 30 minutes, so we start to dig ourselves.
Takes less than 5 minutes of Googling to discover its a “security tool” for enterprises that works exactly like the worst piece of malware you could imagine. It has the works. Here is just some random quotes from the website, of what kind of user behaviour triggers a red flag in their systems:
Accessing upload and sharing cloud services
Copying any text from a sensitive file
Performing large file or folder copy
Clearing browsing history in IE or Firefox
Typing sensitive intellectual property related words in web mail, Chat, IM, Social Media sites
Taking screenshot using keyboard shortcut
Browsing competitor sites
Browsing counter-productivity sites (Spotify)
Browsing Job Searching sites (LinkedIn)
Browsing Streaming media sites (Netflix)
Browsing information outlets (WikiLeaks-like)
Changing own password by currently logged in user
The list is about 1000 lines of random user behaviour that anybody employed in high-tech (or probably most other jobs involving a computer) will do all the time.
Are you f'ing kidding me? I lost my mind when I saw this. After about 1 hour some random security dude joined the chat and said something like “yeah we installed it on everybody's computers, but you all agreed to it when you signed your contract”, referring to a 60 page document of bullshit legalese generally saying they can do whatever they want, as workers have no rights and companies don't give a shit.
We complain some more and security guys again write some bullshit response about “yeah well look we don't record your screen all the time, only when we see suspicious behaviour so don't worry, if you have other questions take it to my boss”.
Next few days we fight on, mostly pissed that this was just done without informing anybody, but nobody in management gave a shit or didn't have enough courage to challenge any decision from the leadership, so we were basically just told to shut the fuck up and continue making money for the CEO while the company went fucking Snowden-era NSA on all of their employees.
Thanks for listing to my vent.