Company Laptop, My Data — Can They Co-exist? 395
An anonymous reader writes "I recently replaced my old laptop. The owner of my company heard about this and offered to reimburse me for it, since he knows I have and will continue to do company work on my own hardware. I'd like the extra $1,250, but I think if I accept his offer that legally he has the right to any data on it (personal emails, files, blog posts, etc.). Even if I decide to put my personal stuff on a second drive, I'm worried that using company property to save and write to separate storage still gives them the right to it. The apps (Office, etc.) are my own licenses. We do not have a policy that intellectual property developed using company assets belongs to the company. But, if I figured out the One Great Internet Business Idea or write the Great American Novel and used the company laptop to do it, it's an avenue they could use to claim they own it. Unlikely, but scary. How many Slashdotters have been in this situation, and what agreement did you and your management come up with?"
Have them make it a bonus (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlikely, but scary.
Your fears are not unfounded. As someone who has had "e-mail forensics" done on his company's MS Exchange during an investigation of a coworker, I can assure you that while it may not be something that you've done to trigger this it does happen. And nobody wants to be in a compromising position should their relationship with their employer goes bad.
So your solution is simple: send him an e-mail explaining that this new laptop is going to function as your main personal laptop with family photos and videos and whatnot. Tell him that you'd love to accept the $1,250 as an award or included with your next paycheck as special compensation but the laptop won't be inventoried or tagged by the company. Make it clear it's your property and not a company asset. Offer to bring in the invoice for him to look at if he's concerned you're buying a car with it instead and get it in writing. If you get the money awarded to you to do with as you see fit but you have an informal agreement that this will go toward your personal laptop, everything should be fine.
Work locally, store globally (Score:1, Interesting)
- Obfuscate code, CYA
- Use remote administration software to work on a remote (home?) computer, and store documents there
- Alternatively, for web apps, remote into a server and do your work remotely.
- Use Google Docs to store your Office-y documents
In the age of teh internets, what's the problem?
The other way around (Score:2, Interesting)
At my previous company, we went the other direction...no personal equipment was allowed. If you needed a tool (e.g. a laptop), it was provided.
We didn't want the liability of damage or theft of someone's personal equipment. Further, we didn't want to deal with things like users bringing in tools that impact the network, we didn't want to have any issues with software licensing (who provides or you bring in non-licensed software), etc. We also had problems with people bringing in things like printers and then having the company pay for ink (that gets expensive) or wireless routers and creating new and unauthorized access points. Beyond even things like people wanting to bring in their own [monitor, video card, sound card, speakers, desktop, etc], we unfortunately faced the issue of dealing with these things (prior to the policy) when on rare occasions someone was fired and IT had to dismantle a PC, etc.
I guess I'm a fan of keeping work and personal apart.
Loan (Score:3, Interesting)
How I solved the issue... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't do it (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the policy we adopted. As a rule it was decided that you don't work from home - even a remote connection to the work machine was decided as a no-go, despite the obvious advantages it would have (I've had several time I've gotten a call saying "The email is down" - when I drove 30 minutes to the office to do 2 minutes worth of work and then drive back home). Being in government work, it was decided that if the IT staff had remote access to work systems, that it could legally open us up to FOIA requests that could touch our personal equipment.
End result was that if you absolutely have to work after hours or on a weekend, you need to make the trek into the office (though in general working outside of your assigned hours is discouraged except in emergency situations).
Re:Just ask (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Have them make it a bonus (Score:5, Interesting)
No, why did you think that? They didn't buy the laptop for you and hand it to you and say "this is your company laptop", you bought a laptop yourself, put all of your own software and hardware into it, and the company offered to reimburse you for it. Did they say "this is now our laptop, and when/if you leave it's ours"? I'd get it in writing just to make sure, I could see that as being a potential problem, especially if they document it somewhere "reimburse XYZ for laptop", someone might come looking for it someday.
"receive the $1250 as a simple bonus. Have them write a letter backing that up."
Agreed. Helps the company really because they don't have to pay for the software or worry about licensing, if you have unlicensed software on there they can say "Really? We wouldn't know, it's not company property."
In fact I'd approach it like that, I'd tell'em "Hey Boss just to make the paperwork easier so you don't have to keep track of the Office, Vista, Photoshop, etc licenses on my laptop can we write it up as a $1250 bonus? That way there isn't a $1250 check for a laptop and the company would not be responsible for keeping track of the software licenses."
Re:Simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is well established precedence that fired employees must be given time to remove personal items from the office, company car, company apartment etc... This may have been derived from the rules governing eviction of a tenant.
Nobody (as far as I know) has sought to apply the same rule, either to data on a company drive or a personal drive in a company computer.
Re: Another option, #4 (Score:5, Interesting)
#4, Why not use a USB stick as a complete Ubuntu workstation? Here are instructions to make a stick that will either run in a QEMU window on a host Windows OS, _or_ you can simply boot-up directly into Ubuntu?
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-pendrivelinux-2008/ [pendrivelinux.com]
So you can have your cake and eat it too. During work hours, just insert your USB stick when you need access to your own PC.
Re:maybe not that simple... (Score:1, Interesting)
So, keep all your personal stuff in a truecrypt volume. Hell, you could even keep a small linux VM in the true crypt volume, that you could do personal stuff in, and the whole container is easily movable anywhere.
Re:Simple... (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>There is well established precedence that fired employees must be given time to remove personal items from the office, company car, company apartment etc.
>>>
Is there? When my contract expired a year ago, General Dynamics didn't even let me inside the building. Instead they carried everything out to me, and as it turned-out some items were missing, like the award I got from my previous employer Lockheed. They even went so far as to keep my music CDs and MAIL them back to me "after they were scanned" one week later. I threatened to call the local police, but it had no effect to change their minds.
Perhaps you better rethink your plan, because you might NOT get a chance to reclaim your personal hard drive from your desk (or wherever you store it).
Separate what you're doing. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're really doing something of value on your own, be very serious about keeping your own work and your employer's work separate. When I did this, the work I was doing at home was on a different kind of computer than I used at work, in a different subject area. I even used a different color of scratch pad for my own work (yellow for the employer, green for my own work). For the employer's work, I used blue pens; for my own work, black pens of a different brand. No paper or media associated with my own work ever entered the employer's premises.
This is a hassle. It is far less hassle than the litigation required to untangle things if you succeed at what you're doing.
It worked out very well for me, and I was able to retire before I was 40.
My story (Score:2, Interesting)
My story is different, but some issues in it may be of interest.
There was a clasue in my employment contract stating that anyting I did of a copyrightable nature while employed belonged to the company, even if I did it outside of office hours on my own computer. The verbal assurance of the manager who hired me (he was one of the company's founders and my PhD thesis supervisor) was that they would not enforce the copyright ownership if whatever I did was irrelevant to the company's business, but he said it would be polite for me to ask for transfer of copyright ownership if I was to do something for myself.
Several years later, the manager who hired me had moved to a different part of the company. I did start to write stuff for myself. I did ask my (new) manager for a transfer of copyright ownership. In principle, he was happy to do this, but he had to run it past the legal department and get the CTO to proofread the draft of my book to ensure it didn't say anything embarrassing to the company. Of course, looking after the core business of the company and meeting quarterly revenue targets took a higher priority than dealing with my request, so the transfer of copyright ownership took 6 months. That was for the first book I wrote. It took 8 months for the second book. The point I am making is that if your employment contract states you own the copyright of non-work-related stuff that you write on your own time then that will save you from dealing with frustratingly slow bureaucracy.
I work in the consultancy and training department of the company, so I travel a lot. For this I need a laptop. It would have been impractical to carry 2 laptops with me: a company one and a personal one. So when I was working out details of the transfer of copyright ownership, I requested that I be able to keep my own stuff on the company laptop. Both my boss and the legal department were concerned with the possibility of "my stuff" and "company stuff" getting inter-mingeled on the same disk drive. We solved this concern by me buying a compact flash card and a compact-flash-to-PCMCIA-card adapter. I put these into the PCMCIA card slot on my laptop and used it as a separate drive for "my stuff". (By the way, I discovered that Windows has dreadfully slow drivers for accessing flash-based devices, but Linux has very fast drivers.) I got a written letter stating that I owned a "project" that was on the PCMCIA-card drive if my employer pre-approved the "project". The need to get pre-approval for projects was irritating-but-tolerable for a few years. Eventually, I paid off my mortgage and my wife's university fees. At that point, I realised that I could afford to live on far less money, so I negotiated to switch from being a full-time employee to being a part-time one. Suddenly the issue of copyright ownership became a non-issue because under UK law the company can demand copyright ownership only for what I do during the part-time work hours; what I develop under the rest of my time is automatically mine. I have been blissfully happy ever since.
One last point. About a year ago I bought a netbook. It's powerful enough for the needs of my projects--running PowerPoint, LaTeX and developing small C++/Java programs with "vi" and "make" or "ant"--your mileage may vary. I plug the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard when working in my home office. When I travel on company business, the netbook is small enough for me to carry it and the company laptop. So now I have a more complete physical separation between "company stuff" and "my stuff" and I don't have to endure Windows' slow drivers for flash-based disks.
Re:maybe not that simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
You've made it easier to separate, but you still haven't proven it doesn't belong to the company.
Makezine: "If you can't open it, you don't own it."