In my office, reception is very poor with my carrier on my personal phone. However, my work iPhone has excellent signal. I’m hoping to turn on hot-spot on the work iPhone and connect my personal phone to it to browse sites like reddit and YouTube all the while having a VPN connected on my personal phone.
Question is, will the IT team see what sites I’m visiting? What can they see?
They can know you are using a VPN if they are even semi-competent (running MDM or something similar on the work phone). Check your employment contract/rules as that can be grounds for termination in many places (circumvention of corporate security measures). They won’t be able to tell WHAT you are doing with the VPN, but they’ll know you are using it.
It depends what they have setup on the company iPhone. But if you have a VPN running on your personal device, the most they can see is the times that device was connected, the fact it was using a VPN (all traffic going to/from one IP), and the amount of upload and download you consumed (on a graph mapped to time). From the traffic amount and pattens they could potentially deduce some things, like that you’re streaming video, but wouldn’t be able to see if it’s youtube, netflix, p**nhub, or other.
This always assumes your personal device VPN is set up correctly. Check that your public IP address is that of the VPN company you use, and google “DNS leak test” and use one of the top suggestions to verify your VPN isn’t ‘leaking’.
Check you company policies to see if this is allowed. Maybe even ask your IT if you can do it. There is nothing wrong about asking before doing it. But if it’s totally forbidden, you do it and get caught it could be nasty. Usually companies don’t want to see VPN or TOR used on their network. Work network is for work and personal network is for personal stuffs. It’s the usual golden rule.
VPN on phones drop more often and if theres no killswitch then yes they can see what youre looking at even if the drop is for like 5 seconds
I’m a system administrator and we keep logs of the network traffic. In my computer and phone I use a VPN for privacy. In the logs I can see that my devices are using a VPN but not what I do on them. If the company doesn’t have clear restrictions about it I highly recommend using one.
Use a simple glinet wireguard VPN router, all done.
Not unless you installed a certificate that allows them to decrypt your traffic.
If you have to post this question then you need to be careful about what you’re doing on your phone while at work.
Pretty much this. Using your personal phone to connect to your work phone which is connected to the work network is a sticky situation. They could easily see that you are connected to a VPN which is connected to their network. If you are using company equipment always ask yourself is it work getting fired over if something happens (VPN drops/leaks/etc).
If it’s just bandwidth size, then that’s fine. I’m just self-conscious of the company knowing what sites I visit and what content I see. Thanks.
The company would be able to see the network traffic going through the VPN.
See jens_els response. It is correct. Any company of any size with a competent IT dept will forbid the connection of non-company devices to its intranet. If your company phone can connect to office Wi-Fi, you should be in trouble. Sorry.