So at the weekend my girlfriend and I were discussing a few things and I found a webpage relevant to the topic. I’m not saying porn, but it was an article to do with sex toys
Fast forward to this morning and I’m enjoying my morning gipfeli and want to check the weather. Open the browser on my phone and up pops the page I was looking at the day before. Only afterwards I see I’m connected to the company WiFi on my phone.
I had to be on the company WiFi to send some work related photos over last week. It must have auto connected (now disabled). It’s not a company phone, but we do get work emails.
soooo... time to update the CV? I guess probably not. I imagine it must happen now and then. But perhaps an awkward discussion with HR is on the horizon.
In any case, doubt you have anything to worry about. Extremely unlikely your firm is inspecting log files for 'articles'.. and if they don't want you on certain sites via their VPN or routers then they'd have them blocked.
I used to be involved with this kind of topics where I worked previously and *normally* this kind of data is anonymized and only if there is a serious investigation will data show who the involved user is.
This applies to those organizations that have the proper software in place of course. For smaller setups, the story can be very different.
PS: obviously for this specific case nobody would care. We used to use this kind of pages when troubleshooting filters, categorizations, etc.
Usually porn has been to deliver malware. It's a risk from the data security perspective for a company. From data ransom to industrial espionage.
No idea if toys websites are considered safe or not form this perspective. However......these days it might be more efficient to deliver malware to idiots via cryptocurrency apps and politics websites.
Oh my, reading the title I thought that you were caught by your co-workers watching NSTW content on your office computer
On the technical side really nothing to worry about your phone accident. Unless you got a company phone, which might have a special hidden software preinstalled, it's practically impossible to identify the traffic. The approach is to provide an isolated internet WiFi network for private devices rather than spending huge money on network surveillance software. Not to mention that most likely in your case it was completely impossible to see your peculiar web page. This days all web traffic goes via HTTPS so it's invisible to the network equipment, it's encrypted. However a DNS questions, that is "what is the IP address for www.toys.com" are visible in the network infrastructure. Nonetheless any operating system sends the DNS questions only when it has to find out a web address, so since you had the page already open your phone did not ask DNS question.
Definitely you're embarrassed by the situation but speaking in general, unless it's explicitly written in your job contract you can do in your private life and on your private devices whatever you like, be yourself unless you make some offense to someone, etc. Loosely speaking, why would a porn addict be afraid of his job because of what he/she likes in the spare time? It's the same as being a naturist, lesbian, gay... (choosing terms somewhat related with the NSFW, not that I wanted to point it out as negative terms) why would that interfere with a career?