Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
VPN 4tw.
If you just run a VPN things like zscalar will still get you. They’ll just send the web traffic through the VPN to their proxies and still log everything you do.
There’s ways round it, but all of them will no doubt violate corporate policies.
The only real solution is not to use work computers for non work use.
If you use a private VPN on a company computer, they can still monitor what you’re doing on the local machine, and/or report home through the VPN. And some companies won’t even wait to ask what you’re doing with a personal VPN on their machine - you’ll be in trouble just for installing it.
Or you could be like the company I previously worked for and not monitor anything with any seriousness, but a lowly tech managing some one-off software installs for the office PCs (me) might notice software that shouldn’t exist and report it. Happened to a new guy, the VPN to his home got higher ups combing through his work, and was the final icing on the cake after they also found emails from work to a personal email with customer information attached. They didn’t even entertain an excuse, he was sacked same day. (This was all pre COVID, there was no such thing as work from home)
So yea, definitely…VPN might not be the hammer that falls, but it can start the hunt and still burn you. Someone might use it to browse lemmy, other people might use it to steal company data. It’s not worth the risk for a company to attempt to differentiate between the two. Obligatory ‘your mileage may vary’, especially now with the COVID push to work from home, but it happens!