Warning: What happens on your Android, doesn’t stay on your Android — not if it's a work phone.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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As much as I love google hate, the bigger problem is people thinking work devices are private. They are not. Your messages/thoughts/ideas belong to the organization.
Yeah this is the bigger issue here really. Fuck Google and their invasive bullshit, absolutely, but work devices should never be used for personal/private use, and vice versa. Keep that shit completely separate as much as possible.
Yup! Just cuz your employer isn’t physically there looking over your shoulder while using the device doesn’t mean they are oblivious to what you are doing on it.
And they pay for it, so it’s completely fine for them to track it, in my opinion. Use private phones, people.
You would be mistaken if you think that every work phone is paid for by the employer. A lot of companies have a BYOD policy and still require loading their restrictive bullshit onto it. I have worked at two places like this and I refused to let them do it, but most went along with it. The funniest part if that they still wanted me on the on call rotation, but wouldn’t pay for a decent device so they dug out an ancient Nextel phone for me to use. I have no idea how it still worked.
In fairness, that is a different situation than this.
This is google basically providing a mechanism for employers and parents to pull text messages on devices on their plans. That wouldn’t impact BYOD as that is still not on their plan.
But all the management software and spyware already have those capabilities. Which… is the other aspect of this karma-bate post.
Every work phone, BYOD or not, has had the corporate profile stuff installed which already let them see most of everything. I just assumed this was more of the same. Shame on me for not reading the article.
Good! That’s exactly how you should react to that request. BYOD is only okay if the company is subsidizing your monthly bill, even then it’s a grey area to me.
Yeah, I had no choice on needing a phone for bring on call, but being only able to receive calls or SMS really cut down on the nonsense heh.
I’ve actually never heard about this where I live, in Sweden. Thanks for sharing, even though it sounds both shitty and pretty scummy.
I’m glad to hear that the BYOD trend didn’t take off in every country. Many of the companies would act like they were doing you a favor so you didn’t have the “hassle” of carrying two phones around. Oh that is a hassle, but this was just them shoveling their costs onto the worker.
Private devices in general. I’ve seen people logged into their social media on company laptops as if the incognito window matters lol.
My old boss logged onto her private investment bank account on the work computers/network and bought and sold stock, for example. God knows what else she did. She got fired for using the company card for private purchases. Good fucking riddance. :D
People are so obtuse…
another bullshit Forbes headline…
Since when is a work phone a perk. They have horrible battery performance, only function between 9 and 5 and call quality is absolute fuckin shit.
A work phone is a perk because it means you don’t have to install Teams, Slack, and a bunch of proprietary nonsense you’ve never heard of onto your personal phone.
Seriously, the number of tunnels they cut off in as soon as a call comes in is astounding.
how many people would have clicked on this if the title had used the term “on your work phone” like the first sentence of the article does?
>Microsoft triggered a viral furor when it revealed a Teams update to tell your company when you’re not at work.
This is the funniest thing, people mad that Teams tracks if you’re actually doing work lol
GrapheneOS. Use a work profile. Segregate your work from your personal information. As far as the employer is concerned, they have full control over your device. They can even send a wipe command to it and it would only affect the work partition, leaving your personal data alone.
My favorite tool for managing this is an app called Shelter. Graphene has robust profiling support, but I don’t want to have to swap in and out of something to see info. Shelter allows you to clone apps from your main profile to your work profile. You don’t even have to set up Google Play Services with an account if you don’t want.
Yeah… having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing… I actually side with them when they fire your ass.
Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which… I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you “on call” then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.
Tell me you don’t understand the OS without saying you don’t understand the OS.
Do you really think it’s a good idea to install an unofficial OS on a device your employer owns without their permission?
Again, someone who knows nothing about the OS.
Inform yourself before making these statements. It’s a more secure, hardened version of the official OS. It is not rooted nor is it displayed to the employer as anything other than Android.
Atop making uniformed statements.
Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?
Well color me surprised.
Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying “I need to reinstall your spyware” which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone’s storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.
Are you mental?
Considering I have to deal with these kinds of security concerns on the regular as part of my professional life… kind of.
But you are just switching to ad hominem because your non sequitor “gimme updoots” response to a thread title is nonsense and you can’t admit that. So… I strongly encourage you to wipe your work phone and install graphene with an isolated partition for google/work android and see what happens.