Working From Home? Don’t View Porn on Your Corporate VPN

Like many people, I have transitioned to working from home over the last three years. And part of that has included accessing corporate systems and services with the VPN provided to me by my employer, but I won’t be using it for anything else. Especially not porn.

Did You Just Say Porn?

I did, in fact, just say porn. Whatever you think about pornography, it is legal and what people do with their personal time is up to them. Porn has always been popular and that was especially true early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people were stuck at home. I’m not here to judge. 

What I am here to do is to remind everyone how a VPN works. When you switch on a commercial VPN, it creates an encrypted tunnel between your device (computer, phone, router, and so on) and a server controlled by the VPN. From there, your traffic continues on to the wilds of the internet. This setup means that your ISP and anyone on the same network as you can’t see what you’re doing. Anyone watching from the outside won’t be able to see your true IP address (and thus, can’t see your true location) and will have a hard time correlating your movements across the web.

When you use the corporate VPN provided by your employer, it’s a little different. It still creates the encrypted tunnel and still routes your traffic to a server. People on the same network as you and your ISP are still blind. People watching from the outside still won’t see your true IP address, and will still have a harder time tracking you. 

The key difference is that your employer’s VPN is connecting you to your employer’s network. When you’re connected to your employer’s VPN, it’s the same as if you were sitting in your office, connected to your employer’s Wi-Fi or ethernet. You might be at home in your pajamas, but in the eyes of your boss and corporate IT, you’re on the corporate network.

Don’t Expect Privacy on a Corporate VPN

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been told by smarter people than I am that you do not have an expectation of privacy when using your employer’s network. You should never look to me for legal advice, but it makes logical sense to me that this would include the corporate VPN as well. While technically similar, a personal and corporate VPN function very differently.

A commercial VPN should take pains to keep you as anonymous as possible. The best services go to great lengths to ensure no one, not even the VPN company, knows what you’re doing when you’re connected to the service.

The same isn’t true for corporate networks. Your employer might monitor for activity that goes against company policy, like downloading BitTorrent files, mining Bitcoin, or browsing porn. Employers may also need to keep records of activity, something VPN companies shouldn’t do.

It’s always easy to pick on porn as a thing that you shouldn’t be looking at in public, but I would also invite you to consider what other things you might not want to do on a corporate connection. Unencrypted messages you send could be seen by your employer, along with personal information you might transmit unencrypted—such as medical records, credit card numbers, and so on.

Personally, I try to avoid doing any kind of personal work on corporate networks. It’s not necessarily because I don’t trust my employer, either. I would just rather that information not even be accessible to anyone other than who I intend it for. It’s unlikely that our corporate IT team is going to go digging around for juicy gossip or SSNs, but I would still rather that information simply not be there to be found.

The Appearance of Professionalism

It’s easy to remember that you’re at work when you’re at work. At your desk, under the unforgiving fluorescent light of your office, you’re probably in a work mindset. You’d behave in a work-appropriate way, dress in a work-appropriate way, and browse the web in a work-appropriate way. You probably wouldn’t look at porn, because that’s a creepy thing to do in the workplace.

When you’re working from home, none of that is necessarily true. You might leave your pants in the wardrobe and phone into meetings from the toilet. All that comfort makes it easy to forget that you’re still at work and that if you’re connected to your employer’s VPN, your employer likely has a window into your web browsing.

While the world grapples with this latter stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and people return to something approaching “normal life,” many of us will still be working from home. If that includes you, remember to be mindful of where your web traffic is going. If you don’t need to be using your corporate VPN, don’t use it. Double-check that it’s switched off before doing anything you’d rather IT not see. Use a personal VPN the rest of the time to make sure your connection is secure and more private.

How a VPN Works