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Comment by levesque | Hacker News Reader

After reading this I tried to install an exchange account on my gmail app. It asked for a bunch of extra permissions for the specific exchange account, including the permission to "Erase all data" from the telephone, resetting it to factory settings. Not gonna happen.

From what I gather those permissions were requested by the exchange server, so my university would be the one to blame. Why a server would ask for this permission is beyond me.

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"Exchange" (or, specifically, Exchange ActiveSync) is a euphemism; it sounds like a push email service, but it's actually Microsoft's Mobile Device Management[1] service which happens to, among other things, push-sync emails to the devices managed by it. It often gets set up by clueless admins (of universities, say) when what they really want is just plain IMAP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management

Default permissions are the ability erase everything. It actually requires work to remove those permissions.

Probably just your exchange admin doesnt have an incentive to change the settings.

> Default permissions are the ability erase everything.

This can never go wrong.

thankfully it's not true

> Default permissions are the ability erase everything

No they aren't. You get no permissions by default. You have to do work to get any.

What's likely is Device Administration was added as a feature for exchange admins to remotely erase compromised/old/whatever phones.

I had these at work, so i never linked my phone to exchange. (Its definitly exchange). Our admins were not very competent but appearantly that is the default behaviour.

> Microsoft

If you are still searching on a solution on this: I were able to solve the permission problem on Android with Mailwise. Apart from the cool exchange feature, it's a fairly average client though.

http://mail-wise.com/faq/#bypass

Data protection.

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