A lot of jobs will provide their employees with company-owned laptops or phones to use to ensure they have the technology needed to do the job.

This is also meant to help keep company information off of your personal accounts. Unfortunately, not everyone is as diligent about keeping their personal life off their work devices.

The Washington Post discussed this recently, and the steps you should be taking to make sure your device usage doesn’t lead to anything embarrassing or even illegal.

Factory Reset

You might think the easiest way to avoid any of your details being inadvertently shared is to just fully wipe all the devices before returning them.

But the company may have information on those devices they are legally obligated to retain, so doing this could actually get you in trouble. It also looks conspicuous, so it is best to avoid this drastic measure.

Transferring Data

Maybe you have some family photos on the company phone from times when you didn’t have your personal phone on you to use. You don’t want to lose those, but you also don’t want to return the phone to the company with them.

However, sending data from your device to another device could alert the company due to safeguards against employees stealing important information.

It’s probably best to be upfront and explain the situation to HR and let them do it.

Get Rid of Your Logins

You don’t want to leave the phone to automatically still have access to your Gmail or bank account. Check all the sites you may have used to make sure you are logged out and that they aren’t saving your login.

Deleting Items

It shouldn’t be a big deal if you delete some personal pictures or messages here and there. But you should also be aware that the device may be set up to copy anything on it to a company hard drive. So the damage might already be done.

Still, it’s good to be cautious and also check the device’s cloud backup to get rid of any personal documents there.

The most secure thing you can do to avoid any bad situations on company devices is be diligent about never using them for personal activity. And if you do, assume anything you do can be seen by the company and traced back to you.

Still worried about what you can and can’t do with company devices? Find further clarification from the Washington Post article here.

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This How-To Video shows the safe process to reset your PC back to factory default configuration.

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