Encryption

[NanciBern]

A remote work at home company wants me to turn off my encryption so they can use it for their system. Is this safe?

[Dragon-Fur]

@NanciBern 

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@NanciBern wrote:

A remote work at home company wants me to turn off my encryption so they can use it for their system. Is this safe?

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I think the more important question is why this company wants to "use it for their system".

Use what?

This company wants to use your computer?

Do you want this company to have access to your computer, to your data, to your "stuff"?

If not, consider carefully before you act.

Personally, I don't have any experience with work-at-home companies that need access to my systems to the extent that I think you might be describing.

If the company will have full and unrestricted access to your data AND you are OK with that, then,

• No, it is not necessarily safe - you are trusting strangers with your identity, your data, "whatever" you have on the computer and possibly on the rest of the devices your network.

• Yes, it is a personal decision.

• There is less risk IF you do not have any personal data on the computer AND if the rest of your devices are completely cut-off (restricted) to prevent the same kind of incursion into your privacy on each / all those devices.

Disclaimer

I am biased about this subject in general - my statements are based on little actual data.

Hopefully someone else will jump in and offer an opinion.

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[WAWood]

@NanciBern 

I wholeheartedly agree with @Dragon-Fur on this -- if this were MY PC, I would tell them definitely NOT, I would not disable any encryption on the device.

I have done work at home for years, long before this current Pandemic forced this on lots of people -- and in ALL cases, the company involved furnished me with a laptop that already came with THEIR encryption in place. And, I know why THEY did it, because we were accessing sensitive proprietary information hosted on company servers, and the companies did not want that information released to the public.

If you are using BitLocker to encrypt your entire drive, that would still allow YOU to install apps and access data, so any apps THEY needed on your PC, they could provide you download sites, and you could install them yourself.

So ... I have a really hard time understanding why any company would demand that you remove YOUR encryption. 

You should demand a detailed explanation from them and post that information here -- then we here can provide our comments on that to you.

[NanciBern]

Thank you both. Here is what they sent me regarding the encryption. Perhaps this will elucidate what they are up to, better than I.

"Encryption: Your hard drive seems to be already using the encryption features on your computer. These features need to be free to be used on the Teletech’s drive instead. You could either disable your hard drive encryption"