Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
And the same goes for company wifi if you have to log in with your own username.
Even if you don’t, there’s plenty of different ways to identify a user on company wifi.
For example, have your cellphone named “Stephano’s iPhone”? Narrows it down to the Stephanos working in range of that access point.
I usually used a VPN if I was on the WiFi. Made me feel better even if I’m just browsing memes
Always use a VPN when on a network you can’t trust. There are plenty of free and trustworthy ones you can activate with one click, and then all the company sees is noise.
Different threat models. There’s the threat of being punished or fired by workplace surveillance;
Separately, there’s also the threat of some unknown third-party snooping on your data for whatever other reason (identify fraud, etc).
The post discusses the first and I’d argue that’s more compelling for most people, but the second is also valid.
If the company owns the endpoint there’s lots they can do to monitor your traffic even with a VPN. For phones if you sign in to work mail with your phone and allow them to manage your device just assume they have control of it now.
Never putting any of their software on your personal device is a good rule in general
