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How to separate personal and professional accounts? Everyone knows it's a good practice to separate personal and professional emails, but when talking about online accounts things get murkier.

I maintain open source depended upon by thousands of people, so I am keeping a very strict separation of Github, StackOverflow, etc. I also don't like my personal messages in other networks read by my employee, so I never signed on these.

However, many (most?) websites that are more social-network-like have in their Terms and Conditions that one person might have only one account and that it should be their real name. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. As I am implementing a Single Sign On, I need access to those and security policies stop me from having access to the company one.

So my question is, what do you do in this situation? The three options are not the best ones:

  1. Break company rules and ask for permission to the global company account (email+password).
  2. Break the terms of service and create a second "personal-for work" account. This is not the company account, it would be on my name but private and used to be given permission to certain parts. Would this be an issue for me personally or for the company? What if I don't agree to the ToS?
  3. Break my privacy and access my personal accounts from work (which I'm pretty sure it's heavily monitored). This is not an option as explained.

I'll ask my manager soon about this and it's probably a non-issue, but I was wondering, What would you do in this situation?

In case it's relevant, I'm in Japan where there's very little expected privacy from the individual towards the company.

Note: I wasn't sure whether asking this here, in security or in legal stackexchanges since it touches a bit of all, but it's mainly about the workplace so I'm asking it here.

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  • Accounts for sites like Facebook and Twitter, did you have any of those tied to a personal email address before you started at your current company? If so, what stops you from simply not using them via your single sign-on? – user34587 May 10 '18 at 8:54
  • Yes, all of those I have them on my personal email but not on my work email. What stops me is that I need those networks account for testing, so if I create a new account with my work email I'd be breaking their ToS and I worry they close my employee official account. – Me - May 10 '18 at 8:56
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IMHO, any work related communications should go through work related channels, Doesn`t matter if it is social media, email , messages or phone calls.

And, if you are not self-employed, establishing these channels is your employer job.

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Ask your boss to provide you with a test account.

This way your own and the global company account stays safe and private. And it's the responsibility of your boss to provide you necessary tools/resources to complete your tasks.

For example FaceBook has test-user accounts.

While you could create the test account yourself also, it's best policy to go through your boss to formalize the process. This way it could be added to company policies and benefit also other employees.

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