I just got a job offer where the employer will send me a laptop so I can work from home.
I plan on traveling out of the country and working on the laptop while in other countries.
My Plan is to use a VPN showing my location is still in the United States.
Question: Will the Employer be able to tell if I downloaded a VPN since it’s their Laptop?? Would they be able to tell if I’m in another country?
As u/SalsaGreen said, it may be you can not install a 3rd party VPN service on your work laptop.
You could however connect through a router that runs OpenVPN. You enter your PIA or whomever VPN you bought info into the router and tell it to only allow data through the VPN. The laptop doesn’t know where it is.
https://www.vpnuniversity.com/routers/best-asus-asuswrt-routers-for-vpn-torrent
Of course if employer finds out you left the country, they will still likely have grounds for termination. And depending on the nature of your work, you could be criminally liable if the data you have access to has export control restrictions. Purposeful efforts to obfuscate your location won’t be helpful defense in either case.
Maybe. My employer uses device management that locks down the laptop. Normal users cannot install anything, and some of us have limited ability to raise our privileges a little, though the requester app documents a reason. We use a VPN of our own configuration, and they would definitely know if I was somewhere else in the world. I suspect that it would not work nested behind another VPN (commercial VPNs are fairly well known, and while the exact location can’t be resolved, they can know that you are hiding behind a VPN). Additionally, there are limitations on where certain data can be held, and like many other corporations and government entities, we restrict where our assets and data are allowed to go. This said, if your new employer allows virtual work and does not have an in-person reporting requirement (now during COVID or ever, maybe), then I recommend broaching the subject with you “might be traveling a bit” and what restrictions or accommodations need to be made. I do not recommend being sneaky about it.
Look into openvpn or the like, while you may not be able to install it directly on the laptop you can use a travel router with a VPN configured that will allow you to hide your location. Hope for the best and plan for the worst. I have done this and was prepared to lose my job if caught.
They probably won’t let you install a vpn on the laptop. Look into this router.
Depending on the size of the company, it’s common to not have admin rights to install anything. That’s what the company I work for does. You need something, you have to call help desk for them to install it and I’m only at a company with about 1k employees.
I used to work for an MSP where we managed lots of devices and we installed software on them which would lock them down and stop users from Installing software, we could also monitor many things including location (Country). You’d have to connect to another device that you can put a VPN on such as a router, mobile phone (tether over USB and use vpn on phone). But some may not monitor or lock down that much at all, some of our clients didn’t monitor their staff really at all.
How would this work if your work laptop has a work VPN installed on it already and allows you to access their server and everything without using web browser (ie. Chrome or Citrix or w.e.). Will using a VPN on the router mess this all up? Or would your work still be able to tell what your IP is if you also have their VPN on your PC?
Thank you for Answering !
Thank you !. Yes, I’m having that mindset going into it.
Thank you very much!
wow great! thank you so much!
Your right, that makes sense… Thank you !
Actually I got caught because I was curious if anyone would notice me connecting without using a VPN, and because the VPN added a little latency. My boss above my supervisor messaged me asking if I was in Singapore. Her exact words were “you’re not in Singapore are you?” To which I replied that actually, I was. She said wow I’m kind of jealous and then she messed up because her next question was “how long will you be in Singapore?” To which I replied only a few more days, which was true because a few days later I went to Cambodia. After that I turned my VPN on traveled for 5 more months