Why You Should Never Use Your Work PC for Personal Reasons
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It usually starts innocently enough. You’re expecting a shipping email with tracking for a holiday purchase, so you add your personal email to your work PC. Then it just becomes so darn convenient to have a chance to check on your emails during the day you just leave it there.
Or you may work remotely, and instead of having to switch from your work PC when you get off, it’s just easier to make that family photo collage on the same computer. Before you know it, you’ve got personal items in folders throughout your hard drive and may not realize these all are being backed up to a corporate account by your employer’s managed cloud backup.
While it’s often more convenient at the time, using your work PC for personal reasons can be a huge problem for both you and your employer that can come with consequences ranging from the embarrassing to the severe.
If you’ve ever saved personal files to your work computer, you’ll want to read on to find out why it’s not a good idea and you should probably clean all those personal files off it as soon as possible.
Don’t Mix Work & Personal on Your Work PC
While many employers will have no trouble recognizing the problem with mixing personal items with your work on your company computer, the person doing it might not realize the risks they’re taking. Following, are several of them.
Personal Photos Ending Up in the Wrong Hands
Once you start using your work computer for personal use and possibly connect your iCloud or OneDrive account that automatically downloads your smartphone photos, you could end up with personal pictures showing up and being seen by your superiors that you wanted to keep private.
The digital world is so automated today that being able to send personal texts from your work PC might have been the reason you added your account in the first place, but that one connection could open the floodgates to automatic syncs of your music, photos, videos, and more.
A Former Employer Could End up Owning Your IP
There was a case mentioned on Quora where an employee used their work laptop for a personal coding project. They parted ways with their employer and started their own company. As their former company was recycling their PC, they found the code that was the basis for the employee’s new company and claimed it as their property because it was made on a computer that they owned.
After going to court, because the personal code had been created on the former employer’s work computer, they ended up winning and took possession of his business.
If you’re using your work PC to work on any type of personal project from creating a new software idea to designing graphics, technically your employer could claim that work is theirs since you created and saved it on their property.
You Could End Up Downloading a Virus
A phishing email can come into any email inbox, but if your employer has special anti-phishing protection on work emails, but your personal email does not, you could end up accidentally infecting your company’s network due to use of your personal email on a work device.
If you have accounts that are connected to your work PC but not protected by their cybersecurity applications, you’re putting your company at a huge risk of a data breach.
Your Personal Data Could End Up on the Company’s Cloud Backup
As we noted, using a company PC for personal use generally happens innocently, with just a file or two. But that can quickly snowball into you having multiple personal files in different folders on the hard drive.
Many companies put automated backup software on employee computers to ensure data is safely backed up and recoverable in the event of a data breach, natural disaster or other serious event. That means all your personal items on that hard drive are being backed up as well to the company’s cloud backup system and even if you delete them from your PC, they could still be stored on the cloud service.
You Could Get Fired
Of course, one of the most severe consequences is being fired because it’s found out you’re using your work PC for personal use. Checking personal emails during working hours? Automatic downloads of swimsuit photos taken over the weekend? Unsecure email putting the company’s network at risk? Any of these could be grounds for dismissal.
It’s better to have a policy where personal and work data do not mix at all on any computers. That not only keeps you and your data protected it also protects your company from a security breach.
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