Avoiding Liability While Fixing Employee PCs?

ellem asks: "The upper management team of my company has made a decision that the IT department will work with employee's home computers and laptops. Despite every possible explanation of liability and the loss of proprietary information, the decision was made in order to satisfy a 'need' that the employees have expressed. Many of our employees are, in fact, independent contractors and could go elsewhere with little impact to themselves. Upper management feels offering this service to our employees will separate us from our competitors, and is so committed to this that they have allocated a special budget for tools, software and new hires to handle this particular segment of IT. However, I am still rather worried about general liabilities. While I can keep the network relatively safe and guard against certain types of file transfers, the fear I have is a tech wrecking an employee's home machine/laptop - whether they actually do or the employee perceives that they did. Are any of your shops offering this type of extra service? Do you have any policies in place to protect your company from liabilities that could spring up?"

Comments

Re:A couple of points.

[OhHellWithIt]

All good points. Also, minimum requirements (RAM, OS version, etc.) ought to be specified. My worst home computer repair nightmares have occurred when the OS is so badly outdated that it's going to take all day just to download the patches, or when the friend/family member has stolen software installed. (My father-in-law now knows that my wife and I will kill him if he ever lets one of his friends install software on his computer.) Or the computer has WeatherBug, Kazaa, and God knows what else installed on it.

Bad idea

[Sloppy]

It's a bad idea, but only because getting into "computer support" is generally a bad idea. So many people these days have problems that basically just can't be fixed by any technician, and thus are guaranteed to end in unhappiness for everyone involved:

• They run MS Windows and these boxes just tend to "magically" degrade unless periodically re-installed. Except you can't do that because the user will lose something, because they don't have backups, original distribution media with which to reinstall applications (or even the OS itself), registration keys, etc.
• They run applications (MSIE, MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel) which in turn are vectors by which other malware comes into the system. You can't tell a user "Ok, I made it so that your machine is secure now," when the user has the habit of running MSIE to look at websites on the Internet(!) or is in the habit of loading untrusted data+macrocode into MS Word. (And of course they do these things while logged in as an administrator.) When things go wrong again, these people always complain later that you didn't really fix their problem. It's not like you can tell users to stop shooting themselves in the foot.

Legal department can care of the liabilities. The real thing to think about is: does anyone who does generic PC support, really want more customers? And these people you're talking about, aren't even paying customers. Holy crap, what a great way to lose money and make everyone hate you at the same time.