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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Apparently Apple encourages their employees to use their personal iCloud accounts for company information, because their own OS doesn't support one iPhone, multiple iCloud identities.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/03/confidential-appl...

So yeah.

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Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).

Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).

however, it is quite neat for Apple if employees are "voluntarily" giving up their privacy by merging their accounts and indirectly allowing Apple to monitor their whole digital identity.

Apple is then "just" monitoring the corporate user account for security reasons, it was the employee who decided to use the same account for private purposes...

>Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi.

I'm guessing it's the same reason they don't offer multiple accounts on iPad. They would rather you bought more devices.

As the maker of the iPhone, shouldn't Apple just give each employee a work phone running company's account?

Yes. But that doesn’t solve the problem for every other business or even families that want to share devices between roles or people.

I knew guys at Facebook who told me this and it deterred me from ever wanting to work there (among other things).

Apple can give employees an iphone which will have an iCloud account in apples’s corp domain and can be used only for work. Many other companies do this.

Most companies give you a company phone with a company iCloud account.

According to more than a dozen former Apple employees, apparently not Apple though... despite the fact that they make iPhones.

We created dummy accounts all the time when I was at Apple.

Testing/QA generate loads of them. I still remember one of mine: test_testerson@apple.com

Even Microsoft lets you use your personal iCloud account on corp laptops. They can’t snoop your personal data without disabling SIP or showing system level privacy prompts or recording indicators.

So iOS is essentially unprofessional. A toy for those who have either no job or no private life. How does Android score in that respect?

You can have multiple users on a single device.

https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user

Either with a single local account that accesses multiple Google accounts, or multiple local accounts. Though this is device specific, it may be disabled by your manufacturer/provider.

As mentioned elsewhere though, an enrolled phone is an enrolled phone so corporate wiping will wipe the entire phone and not just the profile.

Not true - you can do full MDM type enrolment or just the one where t can wipe the work part of the phone. On Android and iOS

> and iOS

I'm pretty sure this is a thread about how you can't do things like that on iOS.

Regardless, its been a long time since I've had to use a personal device for work purposes and at the time Android seemed to only want to lock the entire phone down. If that is now fixed them thats great.

It's been a while, but at a previous job (maybe 8 years ago) I was responsible for managing mobile devices and using Blackberry's MDM suite, you could have segregation of personal and private data, where you couldn't move data from one "container" to the other, including clipboard data.

I'm out of the loop now, though.

Android did have better support at the time, but if I remember correctly, devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped, including the personal/private container.

A bit of a pain, but I've always preferred (where possible) to have separate work and personal devices.

> devices that had a work managed profile on them could still be completely wiped

No, personally-owned devices with a work profile cannot be wiped remotely using mdm. But company-owned with our without personal profile can be wiped by a mdm.

Yeah, I had an Android phone at work with separate personal/work profiles, but using the phone to begin with required one main account that had to be my personal. Might've been possible to remove after, but I was afraid to mess with it.

Wouldn't want one phone to be both personal and work though. They owned it, idk if I could've put my own sim in without unforeseen issues, it could've been wiped like you said, and it ofc got wiped when I quit.

Well, aint no way I'm working with a realtor over green bubbles, and they probably have two phones.

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