Why You Should Be Nice to Your IT Department

You should have no expectation of privacy when you are using your work computer. This includes laptops that you may have purchased yourself but use for work purposes. Information Technology professionals can see every website you have visited, every word you have sent over the internet, all of the software you have installed, and all documents you have saved. We can also read your email.

If a reconnaissance mission is sanctioned there is very little you can to prevent your IT department from accessing the information on your work computer. There are some things you can do to make it harder for IT technicians to perform unauthorized snoops.

Take advantage of encryption and encrypt a portion of your hard drive or sensitive files so that a password is required to access the data. Check your Information Technology Department's policies before encrypting your hard drive. Generally the policies outline how information can be encrypted so that your data can be accessed if you forget the password. The master password is secured and would not be available to low level IT staff.

Clear your browsers' history. This will not prevent a higher level IT professional from seeing where you have been on the internet but it would make it harder for a lower level IT technician to easily access that information.

Be conscious of your email subject lines. When your IT staff is performing email troubleshooting it is common for subject lines to be displayed. You can curb curiosity by keeping your email subject lines very bland.

Reason Number Two to be Nice to Your IT Department - We can make you think you are going crazy.

When you drive us crazy it is very tempting to do the same to you. Your IT staff can remote control your computer. We can close windows that you have open, repeatedly eject your DVD drive, lock your computer while you are working, and do other evil things without you being aware that we are on your system. It is not unheard of to randomly eject a DVD drive while sharing completely fabricated ghost stories.

We can randomly disable and enable your accounts. When your account is disabled you will receive a generic error that you cannot log into your computer or email. When you call the IT Helpdesk we can enable it and ask you to try again and read us the error message. At that point you will be able to log in like nothing was wrong. Imagine this happening all day long.

Reason Number Three to be Nice to Your IT Department - For the most part we just want to help you.

Personally I never have and never will perform unauthorized snooping missions because trust is a huge factor in the Information Technology field. It is also very common for IT professionals to be bound to ethical and confidentiality agreements. Your IT department is concerned with making sure technology works as expected and if something goes wrong correct the problem as quickly as possible. We understand that when something is wrong with your computer it is frustrating. Please understand that your IT technicians do not conspire with your technology to ruin your day. In return try not to ruin your IT technician's day by taking your frustrations out on them.