Using own laptop for work - privacy issues?

unforeseen

oh_really said:

Inforn your employer you require a laptop to conduct their work.

Read the initial post, they have a works laptop. They just don't want to lug it around with their own personal one. 

CoastingHatbox

DIYhelp76 said:

Hi, 

I am considering using a personal laptop for work purposes whilst working from home.  It would involve logging on to what I think is a cloud server on a secure site (I think I would log on and be given a code to put in for secure access).  Sometimes the work Tech team may need to "remote" on to look at/fix things etc.

Is there a way I can keep totally separate/secure/private the personal side of my laptop?  In other words, to have two different areas of my laptop: work and private.  So I can be sure that when Tech are remoting on, or when I'm on the work server, none of my personal files/folders are visible/accessible?  I have banking and personal files/photos etc I would want to secure.  The work systems are very advanced and secure I believe so if they are running checks or back-ups whilst I'm online, I'd like to be secure that my personal files can't be scanned/viewed in any way.

At present I have separate work supplied equipment but using my own laptop may give me more flexibility to work from different locations without having to lug a lot of kit with me.

My laptop is fairly old but still a good working machine: HP G72.

Many thx in advance.

The part I've emboldened is of concern to me. The only way you could keep things seperate, is by putting your personal things in a different partition on the machine which is encrypted. With the partition(s) you use for work having no knowledge of the decryption key.

You could also use a VM, but there are two problems with this.

First, you would need a legitimate license key for the operating system you run on the Virtual Machine, unless you are able to do you work with a Free and Open Source operating system. A slightly dodgy but works second-hand OEM key would probably be fine, but your employer is not going to be too impressed if ever they find out. (The company are probably subject to Microsoft License Compliance Verification on a regular basis).

Second, using a VM can be a pretty dismal experience if you are using it for collaboration (Teams, Slack, Google Meet etc..). I've had some success using a cheap external DAC and attaching that to the VM as a USB device for audio. I couldn't get a web cam to work reliably.

The final thing, depending on exactly how you are connecting to the services you need for work, your employer could be hit by malware which is capable destroying all the data on your machine, no matter how it is stored.