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Comment by edgarvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Not having a job-provided phone is great. Otherwise people have the wrong expectation to reach my co-workers almost 24/7, despite not being required to answer, given the nature of their jobs.

Some time ago I made the error of installing my corporate email on my personal phone and i feeled compeled to read every new email, causing me anxiety and stress. I prompty deleted it, not only for taht reason, but because I understood some legal implications of having job-related info on my personal device.

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There is another problem with using your own phone for work: many companies now require you to install their MDM profile to access email or other services. This gives them a lot of power to do whatever they like with the device, remotely. If a security breach occurs and they deem it prudent, they can wipe the phone remotely, for example. And I don't even know what they can access from the phone's content, probably everything.

It's quite simply an issue of ownership: if they don't pay for the phone, they don't get that. If you want root on a device, pay for it and issue it to the user.

So, in that sense a device issued by the employer is better. I'm not installing anyone's MDM profile on my phone, that I pay for, that contains my personal photos, messages, etc.

I thought this has been changing so that it's isolated now, and a remote wipe will only wipe business-related accounts and not your entire phone?

iOS 13, I think. Probably supported on Android, though.

To any employer requiring I use my personal cell phone for work: No. Give me a company phone and you can install anything you want on it (I might still put it in a Faraday cage when not on duty, however).

You may be totally unwilling to work at a startup (a very reasonable position), but I haven't seen company phones become a thing until the company becomes fairly well-established.

But a startup which is unwilling to reimburse people for work phones or provide a phone probably doesn't require mobile device management either.

The best way to handle the MDM issue is to forward emails to your personal email. This has the added benefit that you can select which emails to forward, so I forward emails from my boss, his boss, and the monitoring system.

That sure seems like the exact thing they would want to be preventing...

> The best way to handle the MDM issue is to forward emails to your personal email.

That's a quick way to get a visit from your local InfoSec department for exfiltrating company information to non-company controlled servers.

On Android, MDM profiles create a separate isolated sandbox which doesn't see any of your personal information. This also means that the company can only remotely wipe that sandbox and not your personal data.

There's also very convenient quick setting which disables all work apps and silences all work notations. A critical feature for work/life balance.

Great in theory but a recent post on HN made light of the fact that if your company is investigated then your personal phone can be taken off of you because company data touched it.

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