Ask HN: My client want an agent on my laptop. Is this the new normal?
There&#x27;s a load of nonsense in the comments here today.<p>* Drata is a vendor that helps a company navigate your SOC2 compliance process, by organizing all the controls and helping you gather evidence that you have done so. For instance, they&#x27;ll connect with Github and make sure everyone with access to your repos is a company employee. If you don&#x27;t use Drata you have to gather this evidence yourself, repeatedly over months, and it&#x27;s a pain.<p>* The Drata agent is a pretty innocuous thing. It checks you have done things like turn on disk encryption, have updates enabled, and that the screen locks if you walk away. It does NOT monitor employee&#x27;s activities. These kind of security checks are incredibly common and are required for certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2. SOC2 is not really optional for large enough b2b SaaS.<p>* The poster says &quot;Their business model (in my case) seems to be to take money from companies to spy on their employees&#x2F;contractors, and then they sell the employees&#x2F;contractors private information to &quot;targeted advertising&quot;.<p>Do you have any evidence for this?? I&#x27;ve just been involved in selecting Drata as a vendor for SOC2 compliance planning for our company. If this is true it&#x27;s a huge deal and totally against my understanding of their business model. It honestly sounds like bullshit to me! But if you have evidence that they do this, please let us know.<p>* As a freelancer, whether you are required to install security monitoring software is definitely an open question. If you&#x27;re delivering work separately and not connected to company systems, then ok. If you&#x27;re basically just acting like any other employee, and connected to the company systems, then you will probably have to do this. Because otherwise they would fail SOC2 and managing your legal status as &quot;Freelancer&quot; vs &quot;Employee&quot; (for tax reasons??) is not worth not being certified.