I mean, MS can literally track you between Windows installs, as long as you’re on the same hardware. No surprises here.
How? Is there a way to mitigate this?
Theclouds it is your friend trust me bro
Everybody has a cell phone nowadays. There’s no excuse not to use your cell phone for private stuff. In fact don’t use the company Wi-Fi. You must use the company Wi-Fi then you must use a VPN
But no excuse anymore not to use your phone, you don’t need to use the word computer to browse, send emails, flirt, whatever
Don’t most work Wifi networks prevent VPN use?
No.
And if you don’t have a VPN set up, use Tor on your phone:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.torproject.torbrowser
Guardian Repo on FDroid… preinstalled
Everybody has a cell phone
All of my colleagues have work provided phones and laptops. They do all their personal shit on these devices (they don’t have their own)
They think i’m a huge weirdo for having my own personal devices… “Why waste money? Work gives us computer/phone… Lol, you carry two phones like a drug dealer?”
I mean if all of them have them and use them, then i would definitely see you as a weirdo.
If a company would have fired someone for what the searched on a company computer, everyone would know by now.
Are there even these cases?
WTF? What country? Even at jobs where I was given a phone no one felt like ditching their personal devices.
I suspect its a millenial thing…
A few of us old guys keep personal devices… Our young colleages just expect the company to provide devices for them and never have to buy their own
Or we can’t afford our own 😕.
personal
Decent used laptops are quite affordable. I recently scored one on Ebay for under $100. It runs Linux and everything is snappy.
Anyone know exactly what they could see if you’re on a personal device but work-wifi?
Usually the websites and apps you use, but not what specific page you visit and it’s content.
If you for example visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States they could see that you visited https://en.wikipedia.org/ but nothing more.
This is assuming that the website is encrypted (it starts with https://, not http://), which nowadays luckily most websites are. Otherwise they can see the specific page, it’s content and most likely also all information you input on that page.
if the company had installed something that uses similar technology as a pihole, wouldn’t they technically be able to see everything even if you use https?
Mostly no. PiHole works by providing a DNS server.
A DNS server is responsible for turning domain names such as en.wikipedia.org into internet protocol addresses such as 185.15.58.224.
PiHole has a list of known ad serving domains and when asked to resolve one just replies with an invalid address.
Running the DNS server itself would only give them access to the above mentioned data. However, they could respond with wrong addresses to redirect all traffic over a man in the middle proxy.
For an https secured connection this would just result in a certificate error, warning the user to not proceed. Https secured websites have a certificate electronically signed by a trusted outside party, that verifies that they really are the owner of a specific domain.
Another option would be to redirect the user to a man in the middle proxy that pretends to not support https in order to trick the browser and server into opening an unencrypted connection. This works on some websites, but can be noticed by the user (as the browser now displays “Not Secure” and “http://”) in the address bar) and is protected again by newer security mechanisms like HSTS that allow websites to tell browsers to always contact them over https in the future.
Basically if the site supports HSTS and you have visited it before this also won’t work.
Ah I see. When I run adguard on a mac and enable system wide protection, I think it registers itself as a trusted certificate authority and works similar to the “man-in-the-middle” component that you mentioned. This is just my assumption based on the fact that on https websites, if I click the padlock, the certificate info says “Adguard CA”. It also has an explicit option for a deep packet analysis which explicitly states that it can provide better protection by inspecting https traffic so I am guessing that in theory it’s possible.
Yes. This works because AdGuard is installed on your Mac and adds itself to the trusted authorities there. Basically computers with adguard installed will trust the certificate while computers without AdGuard installed will not trust it.
Some companies do something similar (like another commenter here mentioned), where they install their own certificate on all work provided devices, allowing them to man-in-the-middle all connections. Personal devices without the company certificate installed will then just show the certificate error.
What about private browsing or running a Firefox portable exe?
I mean it’s not blocked, but if you’re connected to their network, they can still see your traffic if they wanted to.
Yes of course. But OP is asking about Browsing history, which is basically the only think private browsing can do
