A guide to see if your employer or school is monitoring your computer

Is my employer monitoring my computer? How to check if you’re being monitored?

We all know the feeling. You got a nice computer from work and now you’re wondering how much personal browsing or Netflix-watching you can do on that computer without your employer knowing about it.

In the ever-evolving landscape of remote work, the boundaries between professional and personal life have become increasingly blurred. One of the pressing issues that have gained attention is the practice of employers remotely monitoring their employees’ computers. It’s a complicated topic – companies need to keep their data and devices secure, but at the same time users can easily feel violated when their activity is being monitored behind their back. This isn’t limited just to professionals working on their company-issued devices, it’s also becoming more and more common with children who use their devices for school.

The problem is, your company-issued device needs to be kept safe and secure, and your employer has every right to do that. Which is why it’s smart to keep all personal documents and data off your work devices. But at the same time it’s just important to keep your company and their surveillance software out of your personal devices. If your school or employer tries to install any remote management software on your personal phone or laptop, you may want to push back and decline. In many cases they’ll state they only want access to an email account or something speciifc, but the management tools gives the access to everything on your device.

How to check if your Mac is being monitored?

Luckily on recent versions of macOS it’s easy to see what’s happening under the hood and if your computer is being monitored.

You might see a notification on your login screen saying the computer is managed by a company, with instrcutions on how to return a lost device to its owner. But if you want a more detailed look, you can navigate to System Settings – General – Login items. This will show you a list of all applications and background processes that are allowed to run automatically on your computer.

Whoever at Apple was in charge of making all these background items visible to the user, thank you. This is a great way to provide the user with visibility on what’s happening on our devices.

It’s not uncommon to have a few background items listed here, but if your computer is not being managed by someone else you’ll always have the option to toggle every item on or off. On a company-issued device that’s being managed by their IT department, you might see items here that are greyed out and out of your control. The names of these background items can be a little mysterious. Most likely there won’t be anything that directly says your computer is being monitored, but on my work laptop I have items like “app usage monitor”, “checkin” and “supervisor”. It’s pretty clear what these are used for.

My computer is being monitored, what do they see?

As a general rule of thumb it’s safe to assume that every company-issued device is more or less monitored. How that monitoring is being done depends on your organization, but it can include

• System information, installed applications, version numbers, pending updates etc.
• Network status and network usage, how much data you’re downloading/uploading
• Security/antivirus status
• Remote Desktop Access – giving them access to remotely view and control your computer screen
• User account details – login/logout times, how long you’ve been active or inactive, number of keystrokers, mouse movement etc.
• Device location – current location of your device
• File and folder access – access to all files and folders on your computer and monitoring file transfers and changes
• Remote Software Deployment – Giving them access to remotely install and force install software updates

I’m good friends with some members of our IT department and I’ve seen how they can monitor in real-time what applications our employees are using, how much hard drive space they have left, how long their computer has been on and things like this. Now, I don’t want to be paranoid and I trust my organization to respect my privacy, but I know for a fact with these tools you could also listen to someone’s microphone or watch the webcam on their computer. That would probably violate some privacy laws so it’s not common practive by any means, but technically speaking it can be done.

I dont’ want to be monitored, what do I do?

The best thing you can do is to keep your personal and work life separate. And when I say separate, I mean completely separate, as in separate devices. There’s no way to have privacy if you have personal files, passwords or browsing history on your company device, so the only safe solution is to do all personal browsing on a device you own and no one else has access to. And the same goes for work – you have a work device that’s mean to be used for all things work, so there’s no need to access work emails or files on your personal device.

Separate devices for personal life and work is the best (and in many cases only) way to make sure both the employer and the users are safe and satisfied.