As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.

Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix…

Large companies calculate this value as a “burn rate”, which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it’s ~$1M in losses.

They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.

I feel like the executives are all in this “AI” echo chamber. Like, most people grossly misunderstand what AI is, what it does and what it cannot do, with current tech… And all the execs are sitting around in a circle jerk making up solutions using AI, for which there is no problem to solve.

Don’t get me wrong, some companies are doing cool shit with it. Not necessarily practical shit, but cool nonetheless, other companies just seem to be drinking the AI Kool aid and throwing it at fucking everything for no goddamned reason just to get in on the hype. Investors are close behind, trying to ride the coattails of their “success” to riches, and it’s all just a self-reaffirming system with no basis in reality.

Nvidia is the one profiting here, all this AI smoke and mirrors needs something for it to run on top of, they’re selling the physical tools to make it go. Whether it goes somewhere useful or drives off a goddamned cliff, doesn’t matter to Nvidia in the slightest. They made their money. Get wrecked.

Legally, it’s fully owned by the company.

My current workplace uses mostly cloud desktops. Basically, even if you’re using a personal system, you install a remote desktop client software (it provides access to another system, it does not allow access to your system), which is used to connect to a server farm of virtual desktop servers. So the work desktop you use kind of overlays itself on your system. Your system is still there, humming away in the background, with it’s only task being to shuffle your input up to the cloud, and bring down the images of your cloud desktop and display them.

There’s some other features, but that’s the core of it. We use a third party “remote monitoring and management” (RMM) tool to administrate company owned systems. You are perfectly capable of using the remote desktop client on a system that’s not company owned. I like this model, since you can minimize or close the remote desktop at any time, and since we (the IT team) have full access to the remote desktop server farm, we can connect to your remote desktop session and see what you see, but only what’s within the remote window. We can’t escape it to see your computer. So if you have a problem with your work stuff, we have access to that. If you have a problem with your personal computer, we need to use a one-time-use (or ad-hoc) remote connection software like LogMeIn or something similar (specifically the LMI rescue type feature set). Once we disconnect from your personal system after doing whatever troubleshooting you asked for, we lose access to that system.

The programs change, but they do the same thing in concept. There are a number of company owned laptops and desktops we have our RMM tools on which allow us to dive into a system whenever we want.

I run a homelab, personally, and when my workplace does not give me the necessary stuff to be productive from home, what I do is build a small virtual system on my home lab, which I remote into when I work (from my desktop), so I can maintain a work/personal division. It’s similar to the cloud system I’m doing at my current job, but the “remote” desktop is a VM on a server in my basement. Other times I’ve been given a laptop, and I’ll set it up in a corner and turn on its built in remote desktop service (to allow remote desktop connections into it), then use the same protocols to connect to my work laptop.

When I’m done work, I just shut down the remote desktop connection and poof, back to my stuff on my PC.

With my current job I went another way, I got a KVM switch, which allows me to switch between two physical computers at the push of a button. (KVM is keyboard/video/mouse) When I’m done work now, I push a button and my screens (I have several) and KB/mouse all switch back to my personal desktop. Same idea but different.

I couldn’t imagine using my personal computer to do work stuff directly. That’s just not kosher in my mind. I have work’s RMM and tools all installed on the system I use for work, and my personal system is entirely free of such things.

I also want to include a short story. Recently a client started a ticket about our company logo being on their personal computer. I grabbed that ticket up and immediately identified the system, and removed it from our system. I followed up with the user to verify that by removing it from our system, the icon disappeared (indicating our monitor agent was fully uninstalled), they confirmed, and I closed the ticket. I kept thinking it’s grossly inappropriate for our software to be on their personal system, and I wanted to get it fixed ASAP. Not everyone is the same, I’ve known users that want or e remote management tools on their personal systems. I don’t understand it, but I can’t tell them that it can’t be there either (the customer is always right, applies in this context).

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, neither myself, nor anyone I work with, nor anyone I’ve worked with in the past, would ever take such an opportunity to snoop or spy on them, but I’d rather not have that liability hanging over my company. All it takes is for one person to have the software on there and accuse us of stealing their private data (say, leud pictures) and publically posting that information on the internet, and I’m sure the policy would change. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, but all it would take is the accusation.

It’s a bad day for us when we see something we shouldn’t, especially if upon seeing it, we’re morally obligated to contact the authorities (in the case of illegal content such as child porn). If course, if something like that is observed by a tech, we must do something about it, but we don’t want to have to get involved in that sort of thing, so we’re pretty careful about it. To put it simply, we’re not looking for anything, and we don’t want to snoop through your stuff, because if we do and we find something we shouldn’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. Not only in the fact that now we need to report it to the police, but also that we need to be able to justify why we were able to see it in the first place. If we can’t justify why we were looking at the content, that’s probably grounds for termination and getting blacklisted from IT, even if it had a positive result (like a pedo being sent to jail).

Bluntly, it’s not worth the risk, paperwork, or inevitable trouble that we’ll face if we do.

Keeping a good separation between personal and work minimizes the risk of IT seeing something that shouldn’t, even if it’s not illegal/illicit. Even your personal financial information. I don’t want to know. I had a call recently with a user who couldn’t log into their bank, and through testing, I was on the lookout for errors while they logged in. As soon as login was successful and their accounts were up, I minimized my remote control so I didn’t see more than I absolutely had to, of their bank info. I got them into the accounts. I don’t care what the accounts are, or what is in them. It seems minor, but that is that users personal information which I do not need to know. I solved their login problem with the site, so I’m done.

I probably have a hundred of other examples, even some where my co-workers had to contact authorities, I’m pretty sure… Every decent IT tech knows that this is a risk and we do what we can to avoid getting caught up in it. We don’t want to have to answer those questions.

If you ever have IT connect to your computer and your background goes black, there’s a reason. At first it was bandwidth related, and we’ll still say that as the reason, but a large reason why we still do it, even into an age of high speed internet, is because a lot of people put pictures of their family, friends, sometimes even inappropriate content, as their desktop wallpaper. It’s hard to miss when it’s your wallpaper. So if it’s blacked out when we connect, that’s one less possible problem we have to deal with.

I’ll stop, but if you have questions for a random internet IT guy, please feel free to ask.

Take care.

There’s a lot of trust required in IT. You must be a trustworthy person. Being fired for a trust related reason is basically a death sentence for an IT career. That being said, none of the tools I typically work with will provide previews of a user’s screen, or such previews will be low enough resolution that reading what is on screen is basically impossible.

When we connect to a system and get a full resolution image of what’s going on, pretty much always there’s some on screen indication of us being connected.

IMO, this is how it should be.

The only time I’ve actively tried to “spy” on a user’s activity, has been when requested to do so by a manager/owner, usually when pursuing an allegation of inappropriate use of a work computer. Even then it’s been very rare, and I can only recall one such instance of it happening at all.

As an IT person, I will say, I could care less what you do with the equipment. I’m busy enough, I don’t need to fill my day with watching you do your job. Yes, we have tools which can allow us to eavesdrop on everything you do, I don’t touch them unless I absolutely must, usually only if I’ve been ordered to.

Another poster pointed out that work resources do not belong to you and legally, they’re right. The system, including all data and work contained therein is legally the property of your employer. This includes your email and any correspondence, and anything else that work provides as a function of your employment. If you create an excel work sheet that does some data processing for you, or reformats information in a better way, during work hours, that sheet isn’t yours. The ownership of the sheet is your employer. Though you did the work in creating it, your employer owns it because they paid you for the time/effort to do so.

Personally, I do whatever I can to avoid interacting with users unique files. I recently refused to work on someone’s personal iPhone because it contained personal data. Though their work email was probably present on the device, I didn’t want to touch it. I did however, provide instructions for them to do what they were asking themselves.

When interacting with work-owned systems, I’ll modify the registry, and run command line commands without the users knowledge, in an effort to reduce the disruption to their workflow, while solving an issue. Generally this is when I have a request from that user, or the company, to get something done, such as install a piece of software. You’ll be working away and poof, new software appears.

Anyone in IT unnecessarily snooping in on your files, can be fired with cause, ruining their career, if they’re caught.

We have access to everything, and I mean everything, in an organization. Your email, files, databases, software… Partly for troubleshooting, and partly for performing backups. If we don’t directly have access, typically we have permission to grant access, so we can grant ourselves permission to access whatever we need to. This means that IT is one of the highest trust areas of the business. We can read the CEO’s emails, send mail as anyone, access everyone’s files, and delete all data on everything in such a way that it is impossible to recover. We need the access to do our jobs and violating the trust we have with that access, is unforgivable and a career-ending event.

I will say that I have not met any IT professionals who will snoop, spy, eavesdrop, or otherwise examine what you do or what data you have or interact with, without a good reason. If it happens, it’s likely that someone else, such as a manager, has requested that we do. We are merely the middleman in that scenario. Bluntly, we’re too busy than to just do it for kicks.

If any IT professional has violated trust, I would report it to management. It is grossly inappropriate to access a user’s system without just cause.

As for notifications, that varies depending on the request. I typically only inform people when I need to remotely control their desktop (interrupting their work) and I’m generally very receptive to being asked to wait before connecting so any sensitive information can be dealt with and closed before the session is established. I have no issue with that. I don’t need, nor want to know any more than I do. I’m never looking for illicit or illegal things unless they are creating a problem (excessive bandwidth use, excessive disk use, etc). For the most part, I try to stay in my lane. I’m here to help, not spy on you to get you fired.

“kill parent or sacrifice children”

For me, working in IT, two things are keeping me on Windows:

• games
• IT tools only made for Windows.

Most remote access stuff is entirely Windows based. Sure, there’s clients so you can connect to Linux, Mac, whatever, from the admin console, but the plugins and whatnot that actually show you the remote users desktop are almost entirely Windows exclusive. There’s sometimes a Mac option, but almost never a Linux option.

Using something that’s more common/public, like TeamViewer isn’t really an option. There’s a plethora of business focused RMM tools that are just web apps with Windows plugins for all the heavy lifting.

The part that gets me, is that any of these tools which allow for self hosting, can have the server and client side on Linux, but the IT team doing the work only gets Windows as an option for the remote control tools.

Infuriating.

Busybodies are definitely the problem. When someone directly asks me about my age I just kind of silently and blankly stare at them until they stop asking.

Bluntly, I’m here to work because that’s how I make money which I need to survive. You’re my co-workers, not my friends. I’ll be friendly, but let’s keep discussions work-related. My age, is not an important piece of information for anyone to do their job. My birthday is the same.

People tend to guess, but they’re met with the same silence and blank stare. If they start asking why I’m not answering, I just tell them that I’m not willing to discuss my personal information.

If they can’t respect my boundaries, that seems like a “them” problem. If try to make their problem into my problem, then it will become HR’s problem.

Personally, I don’t work in highly social environments anymore (I work in tech, almost entirely remote work), so generally I don’t have a lot of opportunities to have small talk with my co-workers. I’m fortunate like that right now. Previously, I would mainly deal with it by exercising my constitutionally protected right to silence. It’s amazing how effective it can be to give someone zero reaction to their question. You didn’t say no, nor give them a reason, nor did you give them an answer. It weirds them right out.

Now, I’ll add the caveat that I do not give any shits about what people think of my beyond my professional capabilities. I think the only times I’ve given a reaction to it is when someone asked why I wouldn’t entertain the questions about my age and birthday, and my go-to reply is that “I’m a very private person”. I don’t talk about family, friends, dating/love life, personal finances, the things I own, where I live… (It’s a long list) When I’m working. The only other topic I try to avoid at work is politics, since it’s so universally polarizing. Discussions about literally anything else, totally cool. My personal life and politics? I’ll be over there points working. Tyvm.

Well, that at least mostly explains it.

But giving the ability for Alexa to activate paid services is kind of crazy to me.

I’d probably want my partner to live forever too. We’re pretty perfectly matched.

OP, age is a number it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen 25/30 year olds with back problems, and I’ve seen 40/50 year olds who have never had back problems. Everyone is different. Don’t think that because they think you’re 25, that you can’t complain “because a 25yo wouldn’t complain”… A 25yo can and should complain if their back hurts. Your physical condition might deteriorate with age, but bluntly, that looks different for everyone. For some it takes longer, for others it happens much sooner.

Do what you need to do to make sure you can take care of yourself.

Idk about OP, but I don’t tell people my age, nor do I tell them what day of the year my birthday is.

I also never divulge my middle name.

This is all personal information, which I do not willingly share.

I’ve never really had a problem. Nobody knows, and they don’t need to know.

OP can do whatever they want with their own private information, which is none of anyone’s business.

You can borrow my iPhone for it. I don’t use it.

I’m so confused how these devices ended up subscribing you to these services without further validation.

I use mainly Google products and I don’t think I can even subscribe to audible if I tried, by voice alone.

Were these Amazon devices or something? I’m really confused.

I’d say it’s nice to see apple and Microsoft getting along like this but…

Not like this.

… Not like this

Well, I definitely agree that corpos are getting away with too much.

The walled gardens of cellphones and whatnot creeping into vehicles, from farm equipment to consumer cars, this is just kind of ridiculous. Everyone wants to be the one-and-only that can do anything to the things you’ve purchased. We desperately need the right to repair for all things… Not just cars, phones, etc (even operating systems are trying to get into a walled garden situation).

They’ve tribalised the very concept of owning something.

Okay, can we all acknowledge that ICQ died when they nuked pretty much all of the accounts for no good reason?

While it’s true it’s shutting down, it was effectively dead for years. This is just the death rattle.

Because it’s important.

If memory serves me, they usually do 5 years of extended support after they retire an os, so, I’m just going to wait and see.

Fair point.

I think the part that bothers me the most is that, the customer is likely completely oblivious to the fact that a repair person used a third party part in their device.

I don’t think most cellphone users are discerning enough to start checking if the repair place is actually licensed by Samsung to perform repairs or not. They just see the Samsung logo under the banner of “we fix these brands” and go in. As long as it’s fully working when they walk out, they couldn’t possibly give fewer shits whether genuine Samsung parts were used to fix the device.

This is essentially victim blaming. Anyone who can fix the phone themselves with non-Samsung parts is going to do it themselves and never get “caught” doing it. So instead of “catching” the “bad actors” putting non Samsung parts into phones, they’re putting that responsibility on customers? That’s a PR nightmare. What the fuck are they thinking?