Fortunately in the US there are laws against surveillance where there’s an expectation of privacy and bathrooms are explicitly called out.

There have been numerous tests and offices and computers have been noted to not have an expectation of privacy, even keyloggers.

Id like to see a case where people take their work laptop into the toilet and employers record business and see how the courts decide that.

To paraphrase the apocryphal Churchill somewhat, now we’ve established that people have a right to privacy at work, we’re just haggling over what those rights should be.

Laws are reflections of attitudes. People in the US believe that they have limited right to privacy at work and so laws are written to reflect that belief. People in the UK don’t buy into that theory and so laws are written that are more nuanced. The first step to gain rights is to believe in them.

And it's worth noting that this "expectation of privacy" depends on the jurisdiction, and in EU there have been numerous legal tests asserting that employees do have an expectation of privacy even when e.g. checking personal email on their company computers in company offices during work hours; so if you have a multinational company you need to acknowledge that you might be prohibited to apply the same IT policies for all your physical locations.

As an employer, I don’t want you checking your bank balance on my equipment. I don’t want to know that about you. I don’t want to worry about accidentally storing your confidential bank info on my servers and then if I have a breach it’s way worse because now your bank info is breached.

And mainly, as an employer I need all the info on your computer, it’s valuable. And there’s not a way to filter out what’s weard_beard’s family messaging them vs work stuff. So I just keep it all.

Of course I don’t do that because I don’t employ people, but that seems rational if I did.

So what I do, individually, is I have a phone. It belongs to me. If I want to check my bank balance, I use my phone. If I want to receive messages about my family’s health, I get them on my phone.

Even if my employer promised never to monitor my work computer, and they kept their promise, I wouldn’t want my kids’ school messaging me on my work email or my work phone.

As an employer you don’t want to give bathroom breaks or pay a living wage either. I’m saying these are part of employing humans. Let’s find a way to make it work

I definitely want to give bathroom breaks and pay great wages. That’s how I get happy and productive humans.

No one needs to check their bank balance on their work computer to be happy and productive. Nor do they need to get texts from friends and family on their work phone.

But everyone needs money. And everyone needs bathroom breaks.

For me, it’s about reasonable vs unreasonable.

I think it would be odd if an employer actually banned bank web sites. But it would also be odd if an employee didn’t want their computer logged in the off chance they checked their bank balance. Or wanted the employer to buy some method of not storing personal data while storing business data.

I mean, my employer is regulated and must store all documents, email, and web traffic I send or receive. I wouldn’t expect them to try to distinguish what’s personal and not store it. Is that even possible?

Is the employer hiring you to use the toilet to produce input for the company’s economic product? like human based manure maybe, then yes.

The outrage seems to mostly be about computer system monitoring but it’s bizarre to me as I’ve also always assumed all my computer activity at an employer device is 100% monitored. Why would it not be? especially this has always been done for security reasons.