Why YSK: It appears several Lemmy Instances are flagged as suspicious and at least 1 instance intentionally using the name of ransomware. A couple of the big enterprise monitoring suites (Fortiguard, ZScaler) will flag your account and may end up with you being pulled into an office for an explanation, or worse.
TL;DR: Keep browsing to your local instance at work for now.
This is why we have a Palo Alto firewall. All internet traffic from a single PC being tunneled over a VPN would set off some flags and quickly be remedied. Good, modern firewalls can do what are essentially “man-in-the-middle” attacks to snoop on traffic. If this was prevented by a VPN it will be immediately known.
“You should be using a VPN” is not universal advice. It’s not up to you when you do not own the internet connection you are using.
Unless you’re handing your phone over and letting them root it, they almost certainly are not MITMing your traffic. At best, they can see you’re using a VPN. If they are able to snoop your traffic, either your VPN is absolutely shit, or you changed some setting you shouldn’t have and fucked yourself.