Can my company see how long I’m active on my computer as a remote employee?

Try posting this on the OT, they should be able to offer you more insight on this.

Sure, there might be some typical OT answers, however the number of views your topic would receive there compared to on this board will lead to more insight imo. Just have to weed through the bs.

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however the number of views your topic would receive there compared to on this board will lead to more insight imo. Just have to weed through the bs.

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this board is the weeding of the BS...

Depending on how big your company is, IT usually doesn't have time for investigation or monitoring unless someone opens a complaint (I saw LSUTgrE surfing pr0n).

However, your usage of YouTube to keep the computer active is much more easily detectable than you think, if all of your traffic, including for non work resources like YouTube, are routed back through the company (which I've seen done plenty of times before). Then, they don't see you not working, but they see you consume huge amounts of Youtube traffic a day. That's easier to detect.

However, you can keep your computer active (no screensaver) in a much harder way to detect, with a mouse jiggler here. I have one of my in my work PC (not because I'm being monitored, but because if it times out it forces to me re-enter my entire username, which is a random string of numbers, as well as my password every ten minutes.) My ex-wife also has one in hers so she appears active in Teams.

The dongle is essentially a fake mouse that moves your cursor a pixel or two every few seconds. On my company Windows 10 PC, it appears as, "HID-compliant mouse" (HID stands for human interface device), exactly like the built in trackpad, and the Logitech legit mouse I have plugged in. The company would really, really, really have to hate you to go digging through detailed device information on 3 "mice" to figure out what you were doing.

I worked at a small architecture firm (35ppl) in Baton Rouge in the 90s, and people would always ask me things like, "you can read all our emails, can't you?" Yeah, I could have, but I never once, in a year and a half, had time to waste like that. That, and my basic sense of integrity and privacy. There were times where the partners came close to asking me to look to see if someone sent out designs to someone they weren't supposed to, but that's serious intellectual property theft, and I still never had to.

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if your IS/IT allows you to install things into the USB, they could not care less about your work schedule..fyi

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No way any company is blocking USB ports for keyboards and mice or any other HIDs, especially in a remote environment. USB drives being blocked? Sure. HIDs? No

A free thing you can do, an outlook presentation will keep you active and your pc from locking, not sure on affect on other apps(unsure about skype/teams) but hit WINDOWS + TAB to open another desktop and open powerpoint and start a blank presentation and then WINDOWS + TAB back to your original desktop.

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We did a “disable USB” project for a company of about 2000 employees a few months ago.

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with a device like this though, its seen as a mouse so its allowed through

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On a company laptop, I would stick to company work.

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That would be fine, if that was the question she was asking. But it's not.

Since we're on unrelated anecdotes, I'll give you a great example of how "control" backfires. A hospital system with 30k employees purchased licenses for Box.com so they could ensure every bit of patient data was encrypted when shared.

Howevah, we analyzed traffic on the firewall(s) and determined there were eight storage services seeing more traffic from within the hospital system that were receiving more than 99% more data traffic than the approved solution in a given week. Plenty of eastern Euro/Russian domains, etc. They tried, and users still do what users do.

Let OP cook lunch or play tennis without being f$*@ with in the middle of the day. Everyone else has Slack, Teams, etc., on their phone, let it go. It doesn't serve an actual purpose. If an employee is a f@&* up, you need to have the sack to reprimand or fire them for not getting work done, not the fact that they spent 39 minutes on TigerDroppings on a workday, or that they didn't move their mouse for three hours.

Users will find a way. Just like when I bookmarked outlook.com on my phone because my company wouldn't use MDM to allow me to see my calendar in 2009.

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just do your work

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That's not the same as sitting at a keyboard moving a mouse around, just to make sure the boss knows you're "working" while not actually accomplishing anything.

Work is a mission to accomplish, not just to play like you're in a WWI movie where you just keep going over the top because you were told to. Profit potential->Mission->Activity.