Privacy concerns about endpoint products

[mmmory 0]

Hello. I want to ask some questions about Endpoint Antivirus which may sound silly. My university is providing a licence of it to all of their academic personnel. I was thinking about installing on my personal computer, and also to my parents'. I did some research about endpoint products and found out that it can be easily monitored remotely. For example, the last time of user's log on, installed softwares, even the names of detected threats, just by using eset remote administrator. I'm wondering is this tool actually allows to spy on your client's pcs? Maybe that's why our school is offering us to install on our computers and monitor what are we doing online. Can you tell me what are the capabilites of eset remote administrator in terms of monitoring users? How far they can go to violate our privacy? Like finding mac & ip adresses, visited web sites, detected threats, installed programs on our pc? 

 

I have a personal eset license which ends soon and if they can actually spy on me with this endpoint product, I would just avoid it. I know I'm being overly paranoid about a university monitoring their 1000+ employees but just a thought.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Marcos 5,074]

ESET Remote Administrator is not a kind of spy application that would monitor what you do. It merely serves for monitoring and controlling ESET Endpoint installed on clients. If you use a notebook that is a property of the university, it's expected that administrators want to have ESET Endpoint controlled by them (ie, to prevent users from disabling protection and getting infected). They can view reports of malicious websites you've visited but not every website you've opened.

[jraley 1]

They can gather your PC name, IP Address, MAC, Device Identifiers (like the serial number if available), a list of every installed application, all detected threats (including websites that were visited with threats). They cannot see your entire web history, only sites visited with malicious code.

[mmmory 0]

Thank you for the answers, those pretty much cleared my head. Notebooks are not the property of university, they just offer eset endpoint antivirus on their software server which can only be accessed within university network. I guess I will just renew my personal eset license and go with that. Thanks again.