Can my employer force me to backup my personal machine? [closed]
- by Eric B
Here's the background:
Approximately 1.25 years ago, the company I work for was acquired by a larger 400 person company. Before acquisition (and today still) we are all remote employees using our own personal hardware for work-related duties (coding, email, etc). We are approximately 15 employees within the larger organization.
Some time after acquisition, the now owning company was slapped with a civil lawsuit. Part of this lawsuit (discovery) is requiring them to retrieve & store from us any related information. Because we were a separate company up until acquisition, there is a high probability that our personal machines might contain information about what the lawsuit alleges (email, documents, chat logs?, etc). Obviously, this depends largely on the person's job function (engineer vs. customer support vs. CEO). All employees are being required to comply.
Since acquisition (1.25 yrs), the new company has not provided us with company laptops/desktops. We continue to use personal hardware, licenses, etc for work.
Email is via POP3s and not hanging around on the mail server - it's on everyone's client.
Documents are spread across personal machines.
So, now they want us each to backup our complete personal machines. They are allowing us to create a "personal" folder where we can place personal documents. That single folder will be excluded from backup. Of course, that means total re-arrangement of documents, etc. For most of us, 99% of the data on the machine is NOT related to work.
So, what's the consensus? Should we comply? What is their recourse if we do not?
