wifi question
I have a question for any of you techy folks....I work for a state agency and my email gets routed thru my cell phone. At work I have Wifi for my phone and this is how I access facebook, email etc. Because of my position I don't really want my employer to know I go to nudist resorts. Recently I noticed that I could get free wifi at the resort, is there a way that my employer would see where I was logged into while on vacation? Thank You
Well, that depends on several things.
If it is your personal phone, but company policy says that the company can ask you to hand them your phone for them to look at. Yes.
If it is your company owned phone, then hell yes.
Being a nudist is probably not a big issue under most circumstances, but, as I worked for many years in an environment where my employer was very invasive, I suggest that you keep your private life private and completely separated from your public/work life.
Generally no, but it would really depend on the network name of the WIFI you are connected to. For example if the WIFI name was just Guest, then if your company asked to examine your phone to see what networks you connected to then they would have no idea where Guest was located. However if the WIFI network was named "SomeNudistResortGuest" Then they would have a pretty good idea of where you have been. It's probably not anything to worry about unless the company you work for is severely anal retentive. If you are that concerned about it you might consider removing any questionable saved WIFI networks you have connected to. As mentioned before, if it is a company owned phone then they will likey have an app installed to audit and likely report where you have been and what you have done. For example if you have an application like Ironport installed.
There are really only two ways they might find out and they are either invasive or rediculous to check. The invasive method is for them to go through your personal phone looking at the wifi networks you've connected to and even then the network name would have to be clearly named as something like 'Nudist Resort wifi'. The second would be if you access work services like email from you phone while on the wifi. Facebook etc is not a work service so would not apply unless you are using a VPN (unlikely on a phone and you would know as you'd have to connect to it). If you do access work services then they would have to look at their logs of all connections to the email or other service and look at the IP addresses that are connecting, do reverse DNS lookups on those addresses (often already in the log) then figure out that the IP address belongs to the nudist resort. Most likely the resort contracts with an ISP to provide the services for them and does not have a dedicated IP address so the address in the logs would just go back to the ISP which could be a cafe, friend's house etc.
In other words it is extremely unlikely and if the company is going to those lengths it's probably not a company you want to work for as they are wasting a lot of resources to be invasive.
Not really a "Techy" here, but I would suspect the only thing they would normally be able to see is the websites you visit while on their system and not the ones you visit while away from it. So as long as you are not accessing a nudist site while at work on their wifi network, then they won't know about it.
Will you be checking email while at the resort? Because when your phone connects to their server to check for mail, they will be able to see the IP address your phone is using. If they look up the address they will be able to tell it comes from the resort. You could always suspend checking work email while on vacation, then they won't have any connections coming from the resort. You could also connect to a VPN that hides the address you are coming from.
As others have said, if you give them access to your phone, they would be able to look through the recent Wifi networks you connect to and look at your web browser history as well, but if they are not reimbursing your expenses on the phone, they shouldn't have any reason to even be asking for that.
Why anyone would let an employer use one's personal cell phone for work purposes, especially in regards to email accounts and access to a company wifi network?
From a personal perspective, it's an invasion of personal property, privacy, and time.
From the employer's perspective, it puts their intranet at a high risk for hacking since they have no control over the security on the phone and what websites it may visit.
The occasional phone call, I can understand as long as they don't abuse one's time away from work. And to me, being a salaried employee is no excuse. They should bite the bullet and buy you a company phone.
Actions
Back to TopicsReply to TopicShare this topic
Get paid just by sending us users/traffic.
Signup takes seconds, start now!
Signup as an affiliate!