Increasingly I find that people I’m helping are working from home or on their own laptop. Which is great, but whenever I suggest that a problem might be solved more easily with the installation of AnyDesk, people are more worried about installing a program on their own computer than on one which belongs to work.
Whilst we do perform updates for people when time is short and complicated changes have to be made, our main aim in support is not to ‘do stuff for you’, but to ‘show you how to do stuff yourselves’ and there really is no better substitute for that than being able to share screens whilst we’re talking you through something.
So it seemed worth reassuring everyone: AnyDesk is free for personal use (we pay for a licence our end), and installing it in the normal way doesn’t let us access your computer without your permission. You don’t even need to install it - if you download it and run it once, it’ll work whilst it’s running, and there’s only a single file to delete to get rid of it forever. If you do choose to install it rather than run it directly from the download, it will still always for a prompt before giving anyone access.