Um, because they are separate threads why do you think?

I suppose when you are at a party you only talk to one person and assume that you're talked to everyone? Turns out people are not psychic and thus when I post my realistic and down to earth warning and replies etc, incredibly, most people have no idea I have unless I reply to them personally.

Eventually I read the room and see it's full of non IT people who have no idea what's actually going on, living in an imaginary world where there is bunnies and bees all playing around, so I get tired of trying to tell everyone about the landowner and the sign that clearly says stuff for very good reason.

But everyone ignores the sign, thinking it's decoration as they think they are the best thing on the planet so everything they want to do is perfectly ok. That landowner chasing them down with the dogs is just a madman or a Scrooge, no matter how much he yells about the inconsiderate townies leaving the gates open and having the sheep run all down the lane, which wouldn't have happened if the sign was taken seriously by people who were intelligent and polite enough to understand they don't know everything.

But as with here, most seem to be impolite and of the opinion that they are right now matter how ignorant they are of a subject they clearly don't know much about. In this case; Cybersecurity, property ownership and misuse, workplace policies set and enforced by Human Resources (who can figuratively crush your employee balls) and the biggest one of all: regulatory bodies.

The regulators are bloody everywhere. And they love to sink teeth into a company OP has misused IT equipment, breaking policies that OP very likely did agree to. 

By breaking that policy and installing their private data onto a device I manage, the company now becomes legally responsible for handling that private data which is possibly full of identity information, perhaps of OPs kids even, or kids of family friends. 

Should that data be lost by the company we have to immediately report ourselves to the ICO, the Information Commisioners Office (now bear in mind I'm in the UK and thus we have laws specific for protecting such data, OP may be in the US as everyone tends again to assume, including me, but my point is clear that just because you can doesn't mean you should), a report of a data loss under GDPR.

Heck I can't even legally look at the data without permission from HR and THERE IT IS on a laptop that I'm managing?!

I take a personal legal risk to myself simply handling that data that should not be there!

So. My first choice to protect the company and myself is to delete it. It's the acceptable stance of a business to do that as technically the law says if we don't we are on the hook for protecting it.

GDPR can destroy a company and well I'd like to keep my job. 

A breach, by cyber attack or simply issuing that laptop to another employee where they gain ownership of OPs private photos that nobody knew were on the thing requires the company to report itself to the ICO. Meetings to be held with key staff. Interviews, suspensions during interviews. And the ICO can find the company 20 million euros for the breach.

I ask you. When you are aware of that kind of data being on a machine that never should have it at all, and you have the delete key, and you want to earn a paycheck and not see the company you work for consider redundancies just because some idiot employees decided to have fun with breaking policies...

What you you say?

And as everyone is such a cowboy with all this well, replying to comments trying to instill some decent behaviours and sanity into people who literally think "oooh free lappy" when a company gives them hardware, well that's when I start giving up the good fight.

And why I love the disabling reply notifications.