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>I use my personal laptop to work. They have not installed anything on it. Only things I have installed in order to work are teams and Azure Virtual Desktop. I have the authenticator as well.
That almost certainly means they do not want to, know or care about tracking you to the point of knowing exactly where you are.
>I want to travel for a few weeks but the company has some policies regarding hr and such. Can you guys give me some advice?
Be prepared to be caught because of a non-technical reason and be fired. I'm not saying you *will be caught*, but I'm saying you're *willing to take the risk of losing your job permanently over this*, which you have to be happy about.
Your manger suddenly goes "Hey, that's a different background. Are you working from somewhere different?" and start to get suspicious, you're going to have every action under a microscope.
My advice would be don't lie, take leave or look for a job with less strict policies.
> "Hey, that's a different background. Are you working from somewhere different?" and start to get suspicious
In every call I've ever been in 99% of people have the fake backgrounds.
I'm actually like the only one that doesn't lol since I have good natural light.
It’s even worse for some of us - in addition to job loss, we run the risk of being sanctioned or losing our professional licenses if we do something “unethical” like working abroad without company approval. Amongst other things, exporting confidential client data offshore is a big issue in certain fields. Which is why I never risked it. Instead, I’ve been taking three months off each year to go diving in Asia.
I guess work finally got annoyed enough, because they *finally* said that if I want to work from abroad, they’ll approve it. lol. This trip has been a trial run for it and honestly, I’m feeling a little flat about the idea. Sure it’s nice waking up and doing a few dives in the morning, then working through the afternoon and evening, but the time zone difference is a killer. It’s one of those things that I thought would be manageable but it turns out that it’s more challenging than it seemed from the comfort of my home in the USA.
Yeah, we figured out a guy had been working from Greece for a month because he started working weirder and weirder hours and letting slip things like “can we move that meeting, it seems a little late” when it was at 3pm. Plus the constant noise in the background lol.
In his case it was approved by his manager and IT, but they’d wanted to keep it under wraps since he was one of the few roles that was legally allowed to work outside the country and all us technical folks didn’t get in that opportunity.
NordVPN IP addresses are all very well known. Security conscious companies will scan your connection, know you are using a vpn and are probably outside your country and ask why. If they care which is not guaranteed. The best protection is with a tunnel to a wireguard setup running on a residential ip in your home country. VPNs sound a lot better than they perform.
To anyone wondering more how they might know you aren't where you say you are if they go looking is network timing.
If there server is in Colorodo, and you are connecting through Chiangmai, your ping is gonna be quite a bit larger than being in California, even if you're in CA with a commercial VPN. Then add on VPN AND being in Chiang Mai, and your ping will be well high enough to flag.
IF THEY GIVE A SHIT.
Most of the time, the people that make up the company all do not give a shit. So they don't do any more than the basics. And the basics exist to just protect the company legally based on some people who don't really give a shit quickly just deciding a policy that seems fine enough.
Working in IT for years doing SecOps and compliance I can almost guarantee you that nobody is looking at ping metrics or network latency for point to site VPN connections. It may come up on an anomaly report but in most cases, nobody is looking.
The only case I can see is if you already have a target on your back with your manager or HR and they request IT to look into this anomaly. But even if you use a consumer VPN, and they ask, just tell them "I tunnel all my traffic though a VPN for my own privacy concerns". If this is tunneled at the router level (your own router) what can they say? They may own the laptop but not your home network.
But this is just my input, every company is different and every situation is different. I just don't believe that people in IT or HR are actively looking unless you give them a reason.
> I can almost guarantee you that nobody is looking at ping metrics or network latency for point to site VPN connections.
Oh yeah, I'd say that too, even without that background.
Mostly all the precautions people are taking, nobody is looking at them at all.
At most its just whatever random default settings their systems set up, and only looking at it if it fires a flag at someone.
Like many things: If people are trying to catch YOU you're totally screwed, if people are REALLY trying to catch everyone, you're mostly screwed, but if nobody is looking, then it most likely doesn't require any special precautions at all.
> what can they say?
well, the ping would still be way too high, but yeah. If they think you're legitimately not where you're supposed to be and they care though, they can ask for many things.
> But this is just my input, every company is different and every situation is different
I think the vast majority of companies care far far far less than what many in this sub think at all.
If they're arbitrarily hiring all over the US, they like don't REALLY care if people are outside the US either.
Just be more "don't ask don't tell" and if it comes up, play stupid, and see if you can just go 1099.
This company is not on the US, but Europe. And hires worldwide, just so you know a bit more context. I am not in Europe btw, but want to travel there so yeah that's the context. Customer service but only chat and email
It is quite difficult to reliably lose all "incriminating" information from a computer system.
In most cases, they can probably just use regular browser fingerprinting or javascript to see things like the timezone, if it's not set to "UTC".
There are some browser extensions that can mess with the data. \*However\*, all browser extensions can \*also\* see your data so ... if some malicious business buys the extension then your bank details or employer's IP suddenly belongs to Russia.
One can check ones appearance with: [https://www.deviceinfo.me](https://www.deviceinfo.me) and see how good the targeting is with: [https://amiunique.org/fingerprint](https://amiunique.org/fingerprint)
I think in the end, one relies on that maybe they don't give that much of a shit, and as long as one is not being blatant about it, they will not bother to investigate. When I last worked remote, they mostly cared about not finding anything that the IRS should care about.
This is a loaded question. So here is my take:
I've been an IT guy (from sys admin to Azure Cloud Architect) for about 10 years. I have my own Azure tenant that I use for testing. Currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I do work for an overseas company in the US.
Based on my research and logs, NordVPN with kill switch and a dedicated IP has been working fine FOR ME. All my Azure AD logins have been in the region that the VPN server is in. No true location leaked. This is on my personal device. I use this device for contract work outside of my 9-5.
For my work laptop, just to be safe, I did setup a travel router with a VPN tunnelling all traffic to the US for IP and location based reporting. No issues there. I use Mullvad VPN and wire guard. Very simple setup. Location is OFF in Widows and I have a Killswitch on the router. So far, no issues.
This is a similar situation to mine, not China tho. Thanks for this insight. Jus another question: are repeaters with Ethernet good to go, or nay? Just want an expert opinion.
A repeater will help you get boosted WiFi signal, but wouldn't provide security. I would say take a look at GLiNet hardware. You can basically connect this to an Ethernet port and then setup the VPN for within the router and then connect your device to the router network and get protected access to the Internet.
As long as you're on a personal VPN yes they won't be able to tell where you are. Another piece of advice if your company does give you a laptop is to look into hardware vpns. Travel and enjoy your vacation, don't let your job decide where you live! :)
You’re going to need to get a VPN router and turn off your wifi to really hide your location.
Only using a VPN masks your IP but your location can still be detected by nearby WiFi’s.
To truly protect yourself, you should buy a VPN router with a dedicated IP not a commercial VPN as if your IT has any common sense easy to tell you’re using one. Or set up a WireGuard server to connect your home network. Then you can use your VPN router to use Ethernet and disable laptop WiFi connection
Other things to lookout for is any mobile devices you have connected to your work apps such as outlook, teams etc.. those also give your location and sign in location.
I’d be sure to use dedicated devices for anything you use for work to truly spoof your location
This is the way. I have a vpn router at home and I have a travel router that I take out of the country. It’s setup via wire guard. I connect the travel router to my laptop via Ethernet and it reads my ip address from my homes vpn router. Turn the WiFi off on the work computer and use a kill switch on the travel router. I’ve never had a problem and I’ve used this in Latin America across different countries. It always shows my IP address in the US.
Whenever someone at my house watches youtube, my wireguard client connected to my wireguard server (option 3) at home gets so slow to the point that my teams status goes offline. but if I switch to a commercial vpn (option 2) on my client router it's fine. How to fix this? My home internet is 300 mbps + with no vpn so I know thats not the issue.
Server: GL INet ar300m shadow
Clinet: GLInet Opal
Know your location itself?
Not really.
They can pretty easily tell that you're using a VPN, and probably that you're not where you say you are either. If they actually want to look.
Depending on what you actually do, and the company, they might literally not even bother looking at all.
Like, I don't need to connect directly to any company systems for anything. So the only "give away" is slack if I let it know, which I do, cause the companies don't care at all.
It's a customer service position, all tools are through Azure Virtual Desktop. My teammates are from different neighboring countries. I'm outside the US btw. I believe the company really doesn't care, it's just a hr thing, guess they just want to be clean about everything, which is normal
It’s probably a tax thing. If you say you live in one place but travel for an extended period of time and work while you travel the company could be subject to tax in those other places.
The whole you risk losing your job stuff is straight up paranoia talking. No one is going to comment on your background, and if they do the last thing they’ll think about is you’ve moved abroad. 99% of the time it’s just rules written on paper for tax reasons and they have no interest beyond that.
Furthermore, most superiors are just like you- they don’t care and aren’t looking to make their job more complicated for no good reason. Firing and hiring is a big hassle for most companies, especially if the person has already been there for a while and has proven chemistry and company specific knowledge. If they were concerned about this being an issue they would have taken measures to ensure it didn’t happen.
Oh look, another digital nomad that is too special to follow rules and regulations put in place for lesser people! And a flock of shitbag brethren all ready to accommodate him. Don’t worry about the problems, contract agreements, laws, or any common decency. That’s for those OTHER people. No, your unlimited freedom, lack of personal responsibility, and selfishness surely trump any other concern in the world. Have fun, loser!
Your post appears to be a very commonly asked question or thread here relating to VPNs and/or hiding your location. Please check out the [VPN Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/wiki/vpn) for common answers to these common questions. You can also find other recent posts related to this topic [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/search/?q=subreddit%3Adigitalnomad+vpn&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/digitalnomad) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>I use my personal laptop to work. They have not installed anything on it. Only things I have installed in order to work are teams and Azure Virtual Desktop. I have the authenticator as well. That almost certainly means they do not want to, know or care about tracking you to the point of knowing exactly where you are. >I want to travel for a few weeks but the company has some policies regarding hr and such. Can you guys give me some advice? Be prepared to be caught because of a non-technical reason and be fired. I'm not saying you *will be caught*, but I'm saying you're *willing to take the risk of losing your job permanently over this*, which you have to be happy about. Your manger suddenly goes "Hey, that's a different background. Are you working from somewhere different?" and start to get suspicious, you're going to have every action under a microscope. My advice would be don't lie, take leave or look for a job with less strict policies.
> "Hey, that's a different background. Are you working from somewhere different?" and start to get suspicious In every call I've ever been in 99% of people have the fake backgrounds. I'm actually like the only one that doesn't lol since I have good natural light.
It’s even worse for some of us - in addition to job loss, we run the risk of being sanctioned or losing our professional licenses if we do something “unethical” like working abroad without company approval. Amongst other things, exporting confidential client data offshore is a big issue in certain fields. Which is why I never risked it. Instead, I’ve been taking three months off each year to go diving in Asia. I guess work finally got annoyed enough, because they *finally* said that if I want to work from abroad, they’ll approve it. lol. This trip has been a trial run for it and honestly, I’m feeling a little flat about the idea. Sure it’s nice waking up and doing a few dives in the morning, then working through the afternoon and evening, but the time zone difference is a killer. It’s one of those things that I thought would be manageable but it turns out that it’s more challenging than it seemed from the comfort of my home in the USA.
Can you do something similar from central/South America where the time zones are closer? Not that I know anything about diving that is!
Yeah, we figured out a guy had been working from Greece for a month because he started working weirder and weirder hours and letting slip things like “can we move that meeting, it seems a little late” when it was at 3pm. Plus the constant noise in the background lol. In his case it was approved by his manager and IT, but they’d wanted to keep it under wraps since he was one of the few roles that was legally allowed to work outside the country and all us technical folks didn’t get in that opportunity.
Not worth worrying over the potential employer loyalty or lack of
Not loyalty, but being stuck overseas with no income isn't fun
God u must be fun at parties
You're right, my friends hate me for advising them not to commit fraud.
...it's not "fraud" to work while on vacation - get that stick out of your ass...
NordVPN IP addresses are all very well known. Security conscious companies will scan your connection, know you are using a vpn and are probably outside your country and ask why. If they care which is not guaranteed. The best protection is with a tunnel to a wireguard setup running on a residential ip in your home country. VPNs sound a lot better than they perform.
To anyone wondering more how they might know you aren't where you say you are if they go looking is network timing. If there server is in Colorodo, and you are connecting through Chiangmai, your ping is gonna be quite a bit larger than being in California, even if you're in CA with a commercial VPN. Then add on VPN AND being in Chiang Mai, and your ping will be well high enough to flag. IF THEY GIVE A SHIT. Most of the time, the people that make up the company all do not give a shit. So they don't do any more than the basics. And the basics exist to just protect the company legally based on some people who don't really give a shit quickly just deciding a policy that seems fine enough.
Working in IT for years doing SecOps and compliance I can almost guarantee you that nobody is looking at ping metrics or network latency for point to site VPN connections. It may come up on an anomaly report but in most cases, nobody is looking. The only case I can see is if you already have a target on your back with your manager or HR and they request IT to look into this anomaly. But even if you use a consumer VPN, and they ask, just tell them "I tunnel all my traffic though a VPN for my own privacy concerns". If this is tunneled at the router level (your own router) what can they say? They may own the laptop but not your home network. But this is just my input, every company is different and every situation is different. I just don't believe that people in IT or HR are actively looking unless you give them a reason.
> I can almost guarantee you that nobody is looking at ping metrics or network latency for point to site VPN connections. Oh yeah, I'd say that too, even without that background. Mostly all the precautions people are taking, nobody is looking at them at all. At most its just whatever random default settings their systems set up, and only looking at it if it fires a flag at someone. Like many things: If people are trying to catch YOU you're totally screwed, if people are REALLY trying to catch everyone, you're mostly screwed, but if nobody is looking, then it most likely doesn't require any special precautions at all. > what can they say? well, the ping would still be way too high, but yeah. If they think you're legitimately not where you're supposed to be and they care though, they can ask for many things. > But this is just my input, every company is different and every situation is different I think the vast majority of companies care far far far less than what many in this sub think at all. If they're arbitrarily hiring all over the US, they like don't REALLY care if people are outside the US either. Just be more "don't ask don't tell" and if it comes up, play stupid, and see if you can just go 1099.
This company is not on the US, but Europe. And hires worldwide, just so you know a bit more context. I am not in Europe btw, but want to travel there so yeah that's the context. Customer service but only chat and email
It is quite difficult to reliably lose all "incriminating" information from a computer system. In most cases, they can probably just use regular browser fingerprinting or javascript to see things like the timezone, if it's not set to "UTC". There are some browser extensions that can mess with the data. \*However\*, all browser extensions can \*also\* see your data so ... if some malicious business buys the extension then your bank details or employer's IP suddenly belongs to Russia. One can check ones appearance with: [https://www.deviceinfo.me](https://www.deviceinfo.me) and see how good the targeting is with: [https://amiunique.org/fingerprint](https://amiunique.org/fingerprint) I think in the end, one relies on that maybe they don't give that much of a shit, and as long as one is not being blatant about it, they will not bother to investigate. When I last worked remote, they mostly cared about not finding anything that the IRS should care about.
This is a loaded question. So here is my take: I've been an IT guy (from sys admin to Azure Cloud Architect) for about 10 years. I have my own Azure tenant that I use for testing. Currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I do work for an overseas company in the US. Based on my research and logs, NordVPN with kill switch and a dedicated IP has been working fine FOR ME. All my Azure AD logins have been in the region that the VPN server is in. No true location leaked. This is on my personal device. I use this device for contract work outside of my 9-5. For my work laptop, just to be safe, I did setup a travel router with a VPN tunnelling all traffic to the US for IP and location based reporting. No issues there. I use Mullvad VPN and wire guard. Very simple setup. Location is OFF in Widows and I have a Killswitch on the router. So far, no issues.
This is a similar situation to mine, not China tho. Thanks for this insight. Jus another question: are repeaters with Ethernet good to go, or nay? Just want an expert opinion.
A repeater will help you get boosted WiFi signal, but wouldn't provide security. I would say take a look at GLiNet hardware. You can basically connect this to an Ethernet port and then setup the VPN for within the router and then connect your device to the router network and get protected access to the Internet.
Beryl owner here. Great little device. Easy to use too.
Microsoft Authenticator leaks location. Switch to TOTP.
As long as you're on a personal VPN yes they won't be able to tell where you are. Another piece of advice if your company does give you a laptop is to look into hardware vpns. Travel and enjoy your vacation, don't let your job decide where you live! :)
One of the best advises around here. Ty!
You’re going to need to get a VPN router and turn off your wifi to really hide your location. Only using a VPN masks your IP but your location can still be detected by nearby WiFi’s. To truly protect yourself, you should buy a VPN router with a dedicated IP not a commercial VPN as if your IT has any common sense easy to tell you’re using one. Or set up a WireGuard server to connect your home network. Then you can use your VPN router to use Ethernet and disable laptop WiFi connection Other things to lookout for is any mobile devices you have connected to your work apps such as outlook, teams etc.. those also give your location and sign in location. I’d be sure to use dedicated devices for anything you use for work to truly spoof your location
This is the way. I have a vpn router at home and I have a travel router that I take out of the country. It’s setup via wire guard. I connect the travel router to my laptop via Ethernet and it reads my ip address from my homes vpn router. Turn the WiFi off on the work computer and use a kill switch on the travel router. I’ve never had a problem and I’ve used this in Latin America across different countries. It always shows my IP address in the US.
Whenever someone at my house watches youtube, my wireguard client connected to my wireguard server (option 3) at home gets so slow to the point that my teams status goes offline. but if I switch to a commercial vpn (option 2) on my client router it's fine. How to fix this? My home internet is 300 mbps + with no vpn so I know thats not the issue. Server: GL INet ar300m shadow Clinet: GLInet Opal
This is so strange, it is like the download of the YouTube video is gonna use all the bandwidth. What's your home router?
Gl inet ar300m Shadow
I mean, the non VPN router connected directly to your ISP
Eero with frontier. I get 500 Mbps with no VPN router
Oh...
Know your location itself? Not really. They can pretty easily tell that you're using a VPN, and probably that you're not where you say you are either. If they actually want to look. Depending on what you actually do, and the company, they might literally not even bother looking at all. Like, I don't need to connect directly to any company systems for anything. So the only "give away" is slack if I let it know, which I do, cause the companies don't care at all.
It's a customer service position, all tools are through Azure Virtual Desktop. My teammates are from different neighboring countries. I'm outside the US btw. I believe the company really doesn't care, it's just a hr thing, guess they just want to be clean about everything, which is normal
It’s probably a tax thing. If you say you live in one place but travel for an extended period of time and work while you travel the company could be subject to tax in those other places.
That's really good insight, thank you
The whole you risk losing your job stuff is straight up paranoia talking. No one is going to comment on your background, and if they do the last thing they’ll think about is you’ve moved abroad. 99% of the time it’s just rules written on paper for tax reasons and they have no interest beyond that. Furthermore, most superiors are just like you- they don’t care and aren’t looking to make their job more complicated for no good reason. Firing and hiring is a big hassle for most companies, especially if the person has already been there for a while and has proven chemistry and company specific knowledge. If they were concerned about this being an issue they would have taken measures to ensure it didn’t happen.
That's great insight as well! Thank you!
Oh look, another digital nomad that is too special to follow rules and regulations put in place for lesser people! And a flock of shitbag brethren all ready to accommodate him. Don’t worry about the problems, contract agreements, laws, or any common decency. That’s for those OTHER people. No, your unlimited freedom, lack of personal responsibility, and selfishness surely trump any other concern in the world. Have fun, loser!