When Your Company Remote-Wipes Your Personal Phone

Xenographic writes "NPR has a story about someone whose personal iPhone got remotely wiped by their employer. It was actually a mistake, but it was something of a surprise because they didn't believe they had given their employer any kind of access to do that. This may already be very familiar to Microsoft Exchange admins, but the problem was her iPhone's integration with MS Exchange automatically gives the server admin access to do remote wipes. All you have to do is configure the phone to receive email from an MS Exchange server and the server admin can wipe your phone at will. The phone wasn't bricked, even though absolutely all of its data was wiped, because the data could be restored from backup, assuming that someone had remembered to make one. But this also works on other devices like iPads, Blackberry phones, and other smartphones that integrate with MS Exchange. So if you read your work email on your personal phone or tablet, you might want to make sure that you keep backups, just in case."

Comments

hahahaha Becks

[Anonymous Coward]

told ya they could do it!

Hmmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this meaning that the Mails were deleted on the server?

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this meaning that the Mails were deleted on the server?

No, it means that all the data was wiped from the phone, just like the summary and article say.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[causality]

Is this meaning that the Mails were deleted on the server?

No, that wouldn't wipe a phone or raise questions about it being bricked if not for backups. Did you even read the summary?

This is more like the inverse or the equal-and-opposite of (previous?) MS e-mail clients that would automatically execute code from unknown sources as a "feature". Instead of an MS e-mail client it's an MS e-mail server, and instead of downloading and executing code automatically without asking the user to confirm it wipes the phone automatically without asking the user to confirm.

The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes. Then there wouldn't be any problems with a company wiping a phone that is actually company property.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes. Then there wouldn't be any problems with a company wiping a phone that is actually company property.

That was probably their policy and they gave everyone a free Black Berry. Then a few Apple "Fanatics" started whining they wanted to user their UBER sweet iPhones and the company is being racist against their phones if they don't let them use it.

The company gives in after all the whining but the policy regarding a phone being used with their exchange server never changes. And so the policy stands that they can wipe any phone that was had connected to their server.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes.

Why require they be used strictly for business? If the user is willing to take the risk of losing it all, then let them. One less low-value rule to worry about enforcing.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[farnsworth]

That was probably their policy and they gave everyone a free Black Berry. Then a few Apple "Fanatics" started whining they wanted to user their UBER sweet iPhones and the company is being racist against their phones if they don't let them use it.

Or, since I already have a device capable of accessing the company exchange server, I consider it a waste and a burden to carry around another device. This is what I do. While I am not happy about the possibility of a remote wipe, on balance it is worth it to not lug another device/charger/etc. To mitigate the small possibility of a remote wipe, I perform backups. I can't think of a single piece of data on my phone that I couldn't live without, so the backups are really just a convenience so that I don't have to reassemble everything (music, photos, contacts, etc). If I lose a day's worth of new data, who cares? It would only be notes or phone numbers or texts. None of that is critical, and if it was, I would immediately copy it off the phony by emailing it to myself or similar. Hell, I would do this even if no one could remotely wipe my phone, because there is always the possibility that I would lose the thing or accidentally destroy it.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[causality]

The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes.

Why require they be used strictly for business? If the user is willing to take the risk of losing it all, then let them. One less low-value rule to worry about enforcing.

In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes. This is standard practice with company computers, landline phones, etc. Not to mention it's rather unprofessional to conduct your personal business while you're on the clock and certainly a sign of poor time management.

Also, I support the notion of private property when I retain the right to eject an unwanted person from my home. I likewise support the notion of private property when a company that lends you a phone and pays all the costs of that phone gets to tell you how you may use that phone.

Now the requirement that company-paid phones should only be used for business might be backed up by potential disciplinary action. Or it might be backed up by "our company data has been secured; don't cry to us if you put something else on there and now it's gone". Either way is alright by me, and which one it is would be up to the company and employees to work out.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[sjames]

Read that as in "may not be used for non-business purposed ". Meaning nobody cares, but it's the policy so if you want to complain about the remote wipe later they can just say "and what against-policy personal data would that be?".

Re:Hmmmmmm

[marcello_dl]

I agree on your solution but the problem here is technical, not policy related.

an application removes more data than it should

big fail of ms but even bigger for the walled garden=security theorem.

not that i care,if the theorem were true I'd stay out the walled garden anyway...

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Logic Worshipper]

If my boss or other employee who had sensitive data called me (the IT person) and said they'd just been mugged, their personal cell phone they use for business purposes was stolen, and they had reason to suspect the mugging may be for the purpose of corporate espionage, I'd thank god for the remote wipe feature, and I'd use it while resetting all of their passwords (can we get that on flash drives too please?)

There are times when the feature would be appropriate and useful, so I don't think the solution is technical. The solution is using the feature responsibly, and with the consent of the phone's owner. If you intend to use it when they leave the company, you should explain that before connecting the phone to the corporate email server, and make sure they understand. Otherwise you should never use the feature without the informed consent of the phones owner, unless they aren't capable of giving consent (such as if they were dead, in a coma, kidnapped, etc.) People who use the feature irresponsibly are the problem, not the feature its self.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Captain Hook]

Not to mention it's rather unprofessional to conduct your personal business while you're on the clock and certainly a sign of poor time management.

I agreed with most of what you said, except this point. These smart phones are being brought by companies to allow employees access to information outside of the office and they know that doesn't just mean people travelling because they are being brought for people who are based at a single location, it includes people picking up email etc out of normal office hours. In that case, when are you on the clock and when are you off the clock?

Re:Hmmmmmm

[imakemusic]

In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes.

Except for computers, which can be used for browsing Slashdot...right?

Re:Hmmmmmm

[xaxa]

In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes.

Really? In my experience, it's standard practise that a certain amount of personal use is tolerated so long as the employee's work is still done. I'm on Slashdot now, and at some point in the next month I'll print a boarding pass and photocopy the important page from my passport. No one will care, and my manager won't hesitate to remind me of the photocopy password when I ask him.

I've even been known to write a personal shopping list on a company-owned piece of paper using a company-owned pen.

A manager is crazy if he gets mad over £5 worth of stationary "wasted" per year.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Richard_at_work]

Why is this a "big fail of ms"? Microsoft didn't write the iPhones Exchange integration, Apple did - if Apple are deleting unrelated information on request of an Exchange server without a prompt, then its Apples fault, not Microsofts.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Schadrach]

You pretty much explained why my employer doesn't require company-issued cell phones be used only for company business -- the primary reason we have them is so they can call us off hours, on vacation, etc if there's something that comes up (as in "where is material X/paperwork Y hiding at"), or if they need an emergency call in. We also use them effectively like walkie-talkies even when both parties are at the same general site.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[g00head]

That was probably their policy and they gave everyone a free Black Berry. Then a few Apple "Fanatics" started whining they wanted to user their UBER sweet iPhones and the company is being racist against their phones if they don't let them use it. The company gives in after all the whining but the policy regarding a phone being used with their exchange server never changes. And so the policy stands that they can wipe any phone that was had connected to their server.

That is EXACTLY how my company is handling it - most users have been given BBs, but most of the artsy-fartsy graphic designers want iPhones. Since the smarter ones could figure out how to connect their ActiveSync we gave in and 'allowed' them on the server with personal phones, but they have to sign a waiver stating that they understand they must notify IT immediately if the phone is lost/stolen - additionally, they are signing that they understand that we have the ability and right to remote wipe the phone in the case of termination/quitting/lost/stolen.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[marcello_dl]

Apple's fault was part of the walled garden fault which is the biggest fail, as I said. MS failed too since well done program should never request to delete data files which do not belong to it.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[marcello_dl]

If the bad guys are so determined to steal your data that resort to such extreme measures, they are probably likely to know about remote wiping.
Since remote wiping occurs after a signal, they just need to remove battery or antenna, jam the signal, or take it where the signal is too weak (underground garage). Encryption solves this kind of problems in a better way.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[causality]

In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes.

Really? In my experience, it's standard practise that a certain amount of personal use is tolerated so long as the employee's work is still done. I'm on Slashdot now, and at some point in the next month I'll print a boarding pass and photocopy the important page from my passport. No one will care, and my manager won't hesitate to remind me of the photocopy password when I ask him.

I've even been known to write a personal shopping list on a company-owned piece of paper using a company-owned pen.

A manager is crazy if he gets mad over £5 worth of stationary "wasted" per year.

I said there is an expectation. I did not deny that a reasonable manager understands the pointlessness of trying to perfectly enforce every possible expectation or rule.

There is a definite tendency on Slashdot for somebody to interpret a statement in the most black-and-white and/or extreme manner possible, usually so they can nitpick it. I understand a lot of people (maybe not you) have a strong need to feel "right", especially the kind of "right" that makes the other guy "wrong". Still, nearly all of this is unnecessary hair-splitting.

So, to sum it up, I'll put it this way: if you spend seven hours out of an eight-hour day at the office reading Slashdot, and started missing deadlines at work, you can bet your use of company equipment for nonbusiness purposes is going to come up as an issue. If you are still reasonably productive and don't cause problems, nonbusiness usage will probably be overlooked. The better bosses out there establish a certain understanding that you could describe as "don't make this my problem and I won't make it your problem."

we have the same policy at work

[queen of everything]

We have the same policy and will only allow smart phones to connect to exchange when they have the remote wipe capability. It's to protect the company's interests should a phone be lost or stolen. When the users sign up for ActiveSync they have to "read" the terms and conditions where it states that it may be remotely wiped. I don't think most people read it but when you think about the type of proprietary (and often confidential) data your email inbox has, you have to understand why the company does it.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[pantheonwhaley]

Various phones have various types of data wiped in exchange, but if they can wipe anything remotely they say "wipe". Your users should probably check exactly what could be wiped, too.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[geekoid]

sure,all those emails about yet ANOTHER birthday, whose turn it is to clean the fridge, who burnt the pop corn, meetings to discuss the next meeting. Jokes, bus passes.

Yeah, losing it would just ruin a company~

Re:we have the same policy at work

[amicusNYCL]

I don't think most people read it but when you think about the type of proprietary (and often confidential) data your email inbox has, you have to understand why the company does it.

That's a perfectly acceptable policy for any company that provides smart phones to its employees. I don't know if it's true with your company, but I would consider that an overreach if you want me to connect my personal phone with your network and give you the ability to delete all of my pictures and other personal data solely at your discretion. I'm sure you would understand why the owner would find that objectionable.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Cowpat]

What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?

Also, are you expecting employees to take work with them, using their own devices; or is the company willing to bare the costs of either providing a device or the work not being done?

It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. That needs to be made selective and only destroy company owned data (property) though.

Meanwhile I'm sure it'll be explained to employees & contract workers* as only a safety for loss and theft, and most employees & contract workers will opt-in to have their personal data wiped by the same service. Meaning there won't be much call to get separation made a feature unless there's a couple of ugly court cases.

* ...& clients? Upscale clients in negotiations may well be sent confidential information. This actually opens quite a can of worms about document ownership and _access_rights_ to same on a non-owned system. Are you allowed to break-in to access your own property in the digital world? Can you make network access part of a license agreement on third party systems?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Monkeedude1212]

We're actually dealing with a bit of backlash from having this policy - on both sides of the issue at the same time!

I'll try to be as vague as possible to cover my butt - but basically someone who deals with Clients for their job was going to be let go. We wiped their phone, as standard policy. Not sure if they copied the data prior to leaving or if another employee helped them out, but they basically took contact information, pricing/quotes, certain client rates, etc etc and took that to help land another job with a competitor.

Being in IT I know that it's going on as basically our "employee lifecycle" has come under review - but I'm not exactly on the legal team so I don't know how exactly it's progressing. But I know basically we pressed charges for selling trade secrets, and they are counter-suing for something along the lines of destruction of personal property for wiping EVERYTHING off of their phone.

I am not aware of any actual "Agreement" to phone wipes besides possibly verbal ones between managers and their employees and/or IT - there isn't a lot of documentation on the subject matter anywhere - however since starting any time anyone has asked "Can you get my email sync'd on my phone?" My common response is "Yes, but you will be handing over control of ALL The phones data to the company so we can wipe it should you be terminated or leave the company, which includes all your personal phone numbers and appointments". I say it not only to actually warn people of the danger - but its actually a great deterrent and a lot of people reconsider and don't want it anymore, less work for me!

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

Ditto.

If someone wants to connect their personal device to our servers and store corporate data on it, then they must submit to their phone being remote wiped. There have been a few people who have had issue w/ this (i.e. mostly around terminations), but the alternatives (i.e. loss of sensitive data, risk to customers, etc) far exceeds the risk that someone might lose some photos they didn't backup.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I have the same thing here. I always inform staff that I can and will wipe their phones. At their request, and that they should inform me at once if they lose of have their phone stolen.
My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.
That way I get work email, but it is still my account.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dynedain]

Then don't connect your personal phone to the company network.

It's that simple. It's the company's data, not your personal data, and they have measures in place to protect it. If you don't want to abide by those measures, you don't have to.

At least in the US, if you're required to provide equipment required by your job, and your employer doesn't pay for it, then you can write it off on against your personal tax burden. So if you find yourself in that rare situation where work requires you have a smartphone, and won't pay for it, get one separate than your private phone and save on your taxes at the end of the year.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[amicusNYCL]

From TFA:

Someone in the IT department had sent out what's called a "remote wipe," a kind of auto-destruct command that's delivered by e-mail.

I'm really, really looking forward to the first story we get of an admin accidentally sending the message to a contact list, such as the entire company, and wiping everyone's data from the CEO down. Future computer science students will learn about the lessons of the Therac-25, the Ariane-5 rocket, and the Exchange/smart phone integration that brought a fortune-500 company to a standstill for a week.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

but... but, but it's the Company! We all worship the company, don't we?! They fill our fridge! Won't Someone Think Of The Company?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

My $.02 on policy:

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.

  If an Employer *wants* its Employees to be reading their email from cell phones and the Employee doesn't feel like using their own personal property to do so, then the Employer needs to buy the Employee a work owned device or "STFU". If the Employee doesn't want to carry around two devices then they either need to submit to their phone being wiped or "STFU" and carry around both devices.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[tlhIngan]

What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?

Also, are you expecting employees to take work with them, using their own devices; or is the company willing to bare the costs of either providing a device or the work not being done?

It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.

Simple - don't give company access to your personal phone.

If the company wants you to have mobile email, they can pay for it themselves - after all, you're just as likely to not have a smartphone as to have one, so if the employer wants you to have one, they can provide it. I don't see why I should pay for a data plan on my phone that my employer can eat into. What - I went with a 100MB plan and you sent me 200MB of email? I'm not paying the extra $500 that usually costs.

The usual reason why personal iPhones and such are being connected to company networks is simple - the employee wishes to have their email (or needs to have it) and doesn't want the company standard blackberry, or to carry two phones, or other reason. Of course, most companies balk at using personal equipment connected to the corporate networks, either. Still, if you have to have email, either take the company hardware and deal with that issue (better) or use your own hardware and deal with remote wipe (worse option). Most people prefer carrying around just their iPhone instead of iPhone+Blackberry, though.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Hatta]

We have the same policy and will only allow smart phones to connect to exchange when they have the remote wipe capability. It's to protect the company's interests should a phone be lost or stolen.

Do you have the same policy for PCs?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[houghi]

I only give my personal phone to selected people in my company. That would be my boss and with the explicit notice that it is a private number and should only be used in case of emergencies.

If they want me to have a device to connect to their system, they should provide me with one. Just like I expect them to provide a desk and a chair to sit on. Then it is theirs and they can do with it as they please and at the end of employment, they will get it back.

Their device, their rules. My device, my rules.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[IshmaelDS]

That's a massive security breach, one I wouldn't allow on my network. You may want to check your corporate policies and make sure your still inline or you could be fired.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.[...] but it is still my account

That's what you think (and what they want you to think). I bet you see nothing wrong there.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jc42]

My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.
That way I get work email, but it is still my account.

So you and your boss aren't worried that google's staff has full access to your company email?

I wonder if you boss actually knows this ...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

So, basically, you salve your conscience about doing the patently wrong thing of knowingly destroying someone else's data in the name of security by telling people before hand that you might do it, and at the same time, you're the source of probably the largest security hole in the entire system by pushing all your work out into a 3rd party system?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that people don't want to use the phone provided to them by the company. We have waaaaaaay to many people here that bitch about having to carry 2 phones or complain that they want an iPhone and not a blackberry.

I basically tell people, sorry no we are not going to setup your personal phone with work email. If they run to Finance or HR, I make damn well sure that they understand the risks. Even with Remote wipe capability there is no guarantee that the device will be wiped, or that the data wont somehow be recovered.

And before you ask, yes I do carry 2 phones. I like to keep my work and personal life separate, especially because you never know when you might get laid off.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[raitchison]

Our policy is stricter, we explicitly prohibit someone from connecting to the company E-Mail system with a personally owned device, of course we provide BlackBerry or iPhone devices (user/manager preference) to anyone with even a halfway reasonable explanation.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[md65536]

It's to protect the company's interests should a phone be lost or stolen.

I don't think that wiping the entire phone's data goes far enough to protect their interests. Every company should have the ability to remotely wipe your smartphone, and your home computer, and the computers of all family and friends within 6 degrees of separation. Also, they should be able to kill you, because your brain contains precious precious data, too. Really, they ought to be able to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Way too far is not enough, I say, when it comes to protecting a company's interests.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[fishexe]

We have the same policy and will only allow smart phones to connect to exchange when they have the remote wipe capability. It's to protect the company's interests should a phone be lost or stolen. When the users sign up for ActiveSync they have to "read" the terms and conditions where it states that it may be remotely wiped. I don't think most people read it but when you think about the type of proprietary (and often confidential) data your email inbox has, you have to understand why the company does it.

Even so, I wouldn't give my employer the capacity to remotely wipe my notebook PC's hard drive, and all the same proprietary and often confidential data is in my PC's email inbox.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[fishexe]

It's the company's data, not your personal data, and they have measures in place to protect it.

No it's not. He was talking about them wiping all your personal data. "Measures in place" to protect company's data that also wipe your personal data are a bit creepy.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Cowpat]

Risk to the company. To the employee/ex-employee the risk of losing their photos far outweighs the risk to your sensitive data because your data means nothing to them.
Of course, that being as it is, it really ought to boil down to who the phone belongs to. Judging by a lot of comments on this, an awful lot of companies think they can swap that around by merely informing the owner of a phone that the company intends to treat it as its own.

A lot of this conflict could be resolved if people used this rule of thumb: treat other people's stuff (including data) twice as carefully as you treat your own, because it's not yours to lose\break\destroy.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company policy is to wipe any mobile devices assigned to a user when the user is terminated. This is stated clearly in our company policy. It's really fun if they have given the device to someone else without notifying IT and a month or two later they get terminated and the device gets wiped unexpectedly.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[nitehawk214]

Then don't connect your personal phone to the company network.

This.

Furthermore, there is no way in hell I am going to spend my own money on a phone for work purposes. If they want me to pretend to have email access anywhere, they can very well buy me a phone that I can leave locked up in my desk at work, then pretend the network wasn't available when they tried to get in touch with me.

Wait, what were we talking about again?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Cylix]

I don't believe I have known any company that requires you use your personal phone.

However, where I work now it is difficult to get a crackberry (red tape) and I'll probably connect to the exchange server for the time being.

I'm fully aware of what will happen and they actually make an effort to explain it.

However, circumventing the wipe is pretty easy because it does not stop anyone from exporting the data prior to initiating the wipe. At my last place of work there was a trivial amount of work involved in exporting and restoring all of this data. In fact now with the way I manage my data it would be no less intrusive then loading a new rom. (Which I do on occassion).

Re:we have the same policy at work

[nurb432]

We make sure they understand that it gives us that power. We also enforce passwords, even if they didn't have one on their phone before.

And like the OP says, it doesn't brick your phone so no real harm done, but it will ruin your day.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[PitaBred]

So if you find yourself in that rare situation where work requires you have a smartphone, and won't pay for it, get one separate than your private phone and save on your taxes at the end of the year.

You're funny. Rare. Heheh. You don't really live in the USA, do you?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[erroneus]

I can certainly understand and appreciate those company interests. But it completely tramples the interests of the owner of the phone. On the other hand, if the company was also the owner of the phone, that would be perfectly acceptable and I would certainly encourage it.

If the company permits company data on personal property, then the company has already given it away, in my opinion and has waived all rights to the information within.

I had my phone on the company's BES... my carrier wouldn't do anything to prevent the company from wiping my phone when I left the company. So... well... I sort of figured my way around that problem. First, a backup of the blackberry with Linux then I called my carrier back and had them remove BES provisioning from my account. Once BES provisioning was removed, no remote wiping would be possible. :-D I was good to go.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Actually, I do RTFA]

If an Employer *wants* its Employees to be reading their email from cell phones and the Employee doesn't feel like using their own personal property to do so, then the Employer needs to buy the Employee a work owned device or "STFU". If the Employee doesn't want to carry around two devices then they either need to submit to their phone being wiped or "STFU" and carry around both devices.

So you want me to have to carry around a second device because some dev is too lazy to isolate the e-mail stored on my phone from everything else?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that's almost certainly against your company policy, and for good reason, right? You're sending your company's proprietary/confidential communications unencrypted over the internet to a third party hosting service (Google, who is datamining your mail, even if you do trust that no human will look at it), and then if there does happen to be a breach - your phone gets lost or stolen - there's nothing they can do to mitigate the loss.

And you say you're the admin at this company?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a future in politics in the US for you. Have you considered running for congress?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but you never have any way of knowing what other company data is on the phone. Sure, there is the occasional person who only has company data in email. But many more who use attachment viewers (thus temp files outside of their email). There are many other ways to end up with company data outside the email system. I don't hook my smart phone up to our corporate system because I would rather keep it just personal. However, if I did hook it up I would do so knowing that work could wipe it and would prefer that over carrying two devices.

We really need that phone that VMWare was talking about a couple of years ago where it would be one physical device with two virtual phone operating systems on it. I don't know how that would work for incoming calls or texts or whatever but the full on separation of personal and corporate possible in a device like that would be very nice.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

I suppose it depends on the work environment, but we regularly deal with sensitive customer information (i.e. financials, SSNs, credit cards, etc) and this sort of information ends up in internal emails.

I care more about protecting the identities of the people that do business with us then protecting the personal assets of employees that were careless (i.e. by not backing them up) with them.

I suggest thinking of it less as Employee vs Employer and more in terms of information risk.

Implications of having someone's SSN, credit card number, etc get in the wrong hands vs. risk of losing photos taken on the cell phone (that were never posted to Facebook, backed up, etc)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

jackass. it should only wipe your data. not all data.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

And your staff can also forward their email to a google account and download it on their phone, where it cannot get wiped by you? Thought so.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

I agree that the remote wipe behavior implemented by Apple is poor. I guess they didn't want to bother implementing a "user requested" remote wipe (i.e. all corporate and personal data) vs. a "sysadmin requested" remote wipe (i.e. all corporate data).

Given that this is a flaw in the product, we have to work with what we have.

If you are required to have access to corporate email, then you need to either:

1. carry a second (corporate issued) device

2. submit to having corporate data wiped off your device even if that also means that personal data will go along with it

It is unfortunate that for the iPhone, these are the only two viable alternatives...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[guruevi]

Or how about flash drives etc.

The primary reason these technologies exist is for theft or loss of company property aka encryption. They are not going to prevent intentional data theft. If a company wants to connect using Exchange with these features, they should give company property to do so. In all other cases use IMAP or so.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[sjames]

It's fair enough if they have the ability to wipe the mailboxes that come from the exchange server, but any emails from a personal account, contacts, photos, etc should be off-limits to the employer. If that's not good enough, it should be on them to provide you with a phone for work use that can be wiped at will.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[sjames]

Of course, from their perspective, loss of the photos may far exceed the risk of sensitive company data.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[st0rmshad0w]

If an Employer *wants* its Employees to be reading their email from cell phones and the Employee doesn't feel like using their own personal property to do so, then the Employer needs to buy the Employee a work owned device or "STFU". If the Employee doesn't want to carry around two devices then they either need to submit to their phone being wiped or "STFU" and carry around both devices.

So you want me to have to carry around a second device because some dev is too lazy to isolate the e-mail stored on my phone from everything else?

No I want you to carry a 2nd device because its THE COMPANY network, and you will not be root/admin of any device on the company network. Same reason you aren't connecting your herpes-ridden home PC to our VPN. Sorry. Those are the rules.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[besalope]

We're actually dealing with a bit of backlash from having this policy - on both sides of the issue at the same time!

I'll try to be as vague as possible to cover my butt - but basically someone who deals with Clients for their job was going to be let go. We wiped their phone, as standard policy. Not sure if they copied the data prior to leaving or if another employee helped them out, but they basically took contact information, pricing/quotes, certain client rates, etc etc and took that to help land another job with a competitor.

That can be classed as corporate espionage and could lead to criminal investigations. Most reputable companies (competitors in this scenario) would and should turn away any potential employee that offers to do what this person did. If your company were to bring up a lawsuit over lost sales, you'd like win.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that easy to wipe a device. You have to go into a users account select the individual device (as you might have more then one) and choose to erase that device with a confirmation. You can't do multiple devices at once.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mrops]

sure,all those emails about yet ANOTHER birthday, whose turn it is to clean the fridge, who burnt the pop corn, meetings to discuss the next meeting. Jokes, bus passes.

Really.... I mean seriously, what company is this....

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. After I caught on to all the implications of the arrangement where I work (experimenting with a backup phone). I concluded I could get by just fine with an alternative web access arrangement we have for accessing email, and that they can keep their cotton-pickin hands off MY phone. You makes your choices, and takes your chances.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

1. The employees (should) know the risk/policy when they connect their personal devices.

2. SSN, financials, credit cards > photos

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dalcius]

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.

This is stupid.

There should absolutely, absolutely be a way to wipe a corporate account off a phone. That data is the property of the corporation.

But wiping everything is just inane. There is absolutely no reason to wipe pictures, personal contacts, emails, etc. This is software we're talking about. Just wipe the account(s) in question.

The only thinkable reason to wipe data outside of the corporate account is "you could have copied work content elsewhere," and that argument applies no more to phones than to personal computers. Hell, it applies to printed material too. Had any former employers snooping through your house lately?

No, the onus is on the corporation to restrict dissemination of corporate data if the risks are too high. Allowing a remote account wipe is a luxury afforded by software, not a corporate right over personal property.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[sjames]

Agreed on point 1. On point two, last known photo of dead loved one > a bunch of crap data that the company imagines anyone could possibly ever want (they don't).

I have generally found that less than 10% of data a typical company calls "top secret" is at all useful of interesting to anyone.

The whole issue goes away if the company's wipe is confined to company data.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dynedain]

I meant the protection is for the company's data. It's their data, and their protection. You don't like what their protection does to your phone and your data? Then don't hook up your phone to their systems.

It's just like having a personal laptop. Would you bind your personal machine to the company's AD environment, giving them full administrative control? No? Then don't use your personal machine on their network. Use a company-provided machine, or a work-dedicated machine that you can write off on your tax return.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dynedain]

I do. Does your work *REQUIRE* you to have a smartphone? Not simply a convenience for you, but an actual company requirement for you to do the work you are expected to. If the answer is yes, I'd be very surprised if they won't outright buy it or else provide you with a monthly stipend. If they require it, but don't compensate, you get to write it off on your taxes. This is the same thing as uniforms and guns for security guards and for which there is plenty of precedence in the courts. Talk to your CPA, they'll tell you the same thing.

If your answer is no, then you're being the pushover by giving away your resources to the company.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Darinbob]

There seem to be a lot of companies that allow the employees to think that they're required to purchase their own office supplies in this way. No actual rule, but there may be a company culture where everyone has an expensive toy, and they keep bugging you "how come you waited until you were at work to answer the email I sent?" When 99% of the dupes buy their own phone you aren't going to get any traction when you ask IT to buy one for you, instead you are looked at as the trouble maker.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[PNutts]

sure,all those emails about yet ANOTHER birthday, whose turn it is to clean the fridge, who burnt the pop corn, meetings to discuss the next meeting. Jokes, bus passes.

Yeah, losing it would just ruin a company~

Where I work those emails contain your medical claims and enough personal information to keep you in court for years trying to recover your credit rating.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[IICV]

What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?

At my old job, we would highly recommend that employees take the option of using a company-issued Blackberry, which was just paid for directly and that the company didn't really care how you used as long as you weren't calling international with it or something; they even came with a generous data plan that, as far as I know, nobody ever managed to go over (not even the people who figured out (or were shown) how to tether their Blackberry to a laptop). That way, when you left the company and we issued a general "wipe everything on all external devices" command, you'd still have everything you wanted saved on your personal phone.

That's how. Work phone for work, personal phone for personal stuff. Yes it's clunky, but how is an automated system going to know "oh these files are from work and should be deleted, but those files are personal information that should be left alone"?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[IICV]

If the company wants you to have mobile email, they can pay for it themselves - after all, you're just as likely to not have a smartphone as to have one, so if the employer wants you to have one, they can provide it. I don't see why I should pay for a data plan on my phone that my employer can eat into. What - I went with a 100MB plan and you sent me 200MB of email? I'm not paying the extra $500 that usually costs.

At my old job, we would offer to reimburse smartphone plan costs if you decided to hook your personal phone up to company e-mail - with the caveat that if you did that, there was a chance that personal data on your phone would be wiped when you and the company parted ways.

Which is why we highly recommended the company-issued Blackberries.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the remote wipe behavior implemented by Apple is poor. I guess they didn't want to bother implementing a "user requested" remote wipe (i.e. all corporate and personal data) vs. a "sysadmin requested" remote wipe (i.e. all corporate data).

Given that this is a flaw in the product, we have to work with what we have.

If you are required to have access to corporate email, then you need to either:

1. carry a second (corporate issued) device

2. submit to having corporate data wiped off your device even if that also means that personal data will go along with it

It is unfortunate that for the iPhone, these are the only two viable alternatives...

Because the server in the TFA is Exchange any phone (iPhone, Android, whatever) has to comply with the Exchange Activesync policies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_ActiveSync the company enforces. Since EAS doesn't have the magical wipes you suggest I'm not sure how this is an iPhone problem. When an Android user connects with a third party product that provides encryption the whole phone is also wiped. Using Exchange that is the only option an Admin has.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[fishexe]

It's just like having a personal laptop. Would you bind your personal machine to the company's AD environment, giving them full administrative control? No? Then don't use your personal machine on their network. Use a company-provided machine, or a work-dedicated machine that you can write off on your tax return.

I use my personal machine at work every day. I connect via standard protocols like ssh and smb, and never give up admin control, nor would I ordinarily do so. If they explicitly asked me to, I would say no, buy me a company machine instead, but if they said, "hey, if you install this software you can connect to our email servers" I don't really think it would occur to me to go check if the ordinary behavior of that software gives them root on my box. That wouldn't even occur to me.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Darinbob]

Or you could just make backups of the personal data...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[macshit]

Of course one reason such "massive security breaches" happen is that companies have stupidly draconian policies which make "normal" operation so annoying/dangerous that clueful employees bypass it as a matter of course.

Yeah, they can threaten "you might be fired!", but threats are very rarely effective unless they coincide with common sense — which policies like "we can wipe whatever we want!" don't.

I suppose the larger the company, the more likely they are to choose "draconian/bluster" over working with the employees to find an agreeable technical solution...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Apply here.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Darinbob]

Sheesh, you get herpes once and they never let you forget about it.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Their device, their rules. My device, my rules.

Exactly! Having been on both sides... Employer and employee... I'm of the strong opinion that employers should provide the tools necessary for the employee to get the job done. Phones, computers, desks, chairs, etc. In most cases, company business is best done on company equipment. Under company rules. Any responsible company needs to have clear policies about the separation of company business and personal business. For the protection of all parties.

With few exceptions, I believe that once a company gets to the point that they're running on MS Exchange, their policy should be "No personal devices get onto our network." In the rare exceptions, the policy should be "We can 100% remote wipe your stuff."

My observation is that the employees who want to connect personal devices to company networks generally fall into one of three categories: Plan to steal your shit if it doesn't work out in their favor; C-level execs (who will absolutely steal your shit if it doesn't work out); and Company-centric hard-working honest peeps who just want to help any way they can.

By the time you are ready to fire the a-hole that planned to steal your shit from day one, he already has. So he never should have been able to connect his personal stuff to your network in the first place. If you don't have policies and enforcement in place to prevent off-loading company data from company networks, this jerk has already done that, too.

The C-level egos generally just need to be told "No. Here's your i-phoid-berry and laptop." If they want to push it beyond that, start looking for a replacement, 'cause they have ulterior motives and are piss-poor leadership material.

The honest, hard-working, loyal peeps also just need to have it explained to them. If their job is such that remote work is necessary, give them the tools to do the job. If they really don't need to be working remotely, thank them for their willingness to work off-the-clock and devote so much to the company, but the answer is still, "No".

If I'm a good employee, I accept that these are the rules and that they are there for a reason. I also expect my employer to provide the tools I need to make them successful.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[PNutts]

I have the same thing here. I always inform staff that I can and will wipe their phones. At their request, and that they should inform me at once if they lose of have their phone stolen.

My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.

That way I get work email, but it is still my account.

I guess I'll pile on, too...

Depending on where you live and what you do, HIPAA has some exciting new personal liability built right in at no extra charge! So when that claims processor blasts PHI out to the wrong e-mail list, you, sir, have just transferred and stored it in a manner that will have you in court by yourself. Just you in the "Little Old Lady Victim vs. Evil (your name here)" By this time your employment will be a distant memory and your former company has no obligation to defend you. Depending on the company's policies and compliance they will get dinged, but that is a cost of doing business and a separate process that has nothing to do with your personal liability. Have you planned financially for that scenario?

/drama

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Lehk228]

I work for a local department of social services, yes it would be a serious matter if my email were to be leaked to the public, granted i do not have my phone linked to my work mail, but if i did that would have to be addressed

Re:we have the same policy at work

[RubberDogBone]

This is one of the few times I am glad my employer does not use Exchange server. This means that my personal Android phone is not in any way connected to their email system and they can't wipe it or do anything to it.

If they want me to do email by phone that badly, they can pay for a device and give it to me and then it's not my problem if they wipe it.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[intangible]

Time for me to break out the ancient VBScript skills and write a util for all those Admins out there looking for a way!

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

My $.02 on policy:

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.

  If an Employer *wants* its Employees to be reading their email from cell phones and the Employee doesn't feel like using their own personal property to do so, then the Employer needs to buy the Employee a work owned device or "STFU". If the Employee doesn't want to carry around two devices then they either need to submit to their phone being wiped or "STFU" and carry around both devices.

Yup. End of discussion.

(...if only it were...)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[steppin_razor_LA]

I understand -- I'm just saying that I think it is a shame that when I remote wipe a phone, that I am also wiping out the user's data. This is an undesirable behavior and I'd prefer if the Apple implementation of a remote-phone wipe would just remove all exchange data (calendar, contacts, messages, etc) from the phone instead of actually restoring it to factory default.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Darth_brooks]

"I suppose the larger the company, the more likely they are to choose "draconian/bluster" over working with the employees to find an agreeable technical solution..."

My experience is that the larger the company, the more likely you are to run into some jackass that makes you implement shitty "Draconian" policies in the first place. (After all, you *earned* that state school BBA in just 6 years, and that makes you a special and unique snowflake....Those nerds in IT are just jealous of all that Tri Delt trim you used to score...)

You're only as fast as the slowest ship in the fleet. If your sales guy can't get it through his skull that corporate data needs to live only on the servers, then guess what? safeboot time for everybody's laptops. High turnover in your roadwarriors? Hello BES server and crackberry's.

Anyone want to bet remote laptop wipe starts creeping up in prominence over the next couple years?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[SatanicPuppy]

That's commonly allowed in all sorts of business environments, and is perfectly allowable under the corporate policies where I work.

Unless you commonly send secret and or proprietary information through your email (unencrypted) I'm not sure what the problem is? Not much of a security breach, unless you have tons of password information lying around in your email.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if the case of an Iphone, data recovery is one of its strong features... you simply plug it into whatever computer has the recovery data on it (remember backups are automatic anytime you plug it in, so the vast majority of users should have a fairly recent backup) and boom you're good to go again. Same with broken or lost phones... plug it in, and your most recent backup is fully restored. It was one of the Iphones best features if you ask me.

If my Android phone breaks (which it did recently), I have to reinstall everything, and set all my settings up again... it's a real pain in the arse. Not having something similar to Itunes in order to allow easy backups and easy transfers of music and videos is a weak point for Android.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jon3k]

And I'm sure you would understand how we couldn't possibly let you store sensitive corporate information on a device that could be lost or stolen. Right? So either you agree to let us protect the company against the potential liability from the possible information disclosure or you don't get to hook your phone up to Exchange. Pretty simple, no?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jon3k]

Of course one reason such "massive security breaches" happen is that companies have stupidly draconian policies which make "normal" operation so annoying/dangerous that clueful employees bypass it as a matter of course.

...and the other half of the time it's because some entitled manchild thinks the rules don't apply to him, doesn't understand regulatory requirements or the possible legal consequences of information disclosure.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

We also have a similar policy just recently deployed. The firm 'personalized' the phone they had provided us with with a two step increase in salary. One step would increase us to cover the phone and data and the other lesser increase would just cover the phone. The problem I had with the first step was that we were required to sign a waiver giving the company the ability to wipe the device (that I was now paying for) at their discretion and the ability to disable any apps that I might choose to install on my device that they did not approve of without any recompense. The lesser increase only required that I publish my cell number in the corporate directory. My decision? If they want to reach me they can call me and I'll check my email when I'm logged in on my laptop.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I have the same thing here. I always inform staff that I can and will wipe their phones."

The only way you can wipe it is if the person stealing it didn't care about the data in the first place. If they stole it to get your data, the first thing they are going to do is replace the SIM card or use some other technique to make sure you have no ability to wipe the data.

"My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.

That way I get work email, but it is still my account.

Again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you forward every e-mail to google's gmail account, then every e-mail you receive is the property of Google. I am not ant-Google at all, but I am anti smug employer who lectures people, including his employees, on security, but has no actual knowledge of it. (Hint: You should encrypt all of your sensitive data if it will go through your gmail account.)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then don't connect your personal phone to the company network.
It's that simple."

No, it is not. It *would* be that simple, if I could tell the company "no, I won't carry another thingie so you can contact me off-hours unless we renegotiate our contract".

Once they want me to be connected is time for both of us to negotiate our mutal convenience. And my convenince is surely far away from having to carry two equally functional devices or having *my* data wiped in order to protect my hiring company's.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bind my personal machine to the company's AD environment and it won't give the AD environment any control over my personal machine.

GPO? What's that? Seriously, that's what my machine's response is to setting policies.

If the domain admin tries to log in, my machine goes oh that's who you are, here you go, unprivileged user. You can log in and access the network drives, but your domain admin credentials aren't worth anything more than any other network user's credentials.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[turbidostato]

"but you never have any way of knowing what other company data is on the phone."

You never have any way of knowing what other company data is on my brains. Hey, let's allow companies to cut ex-employers heads just to be sure.

Wait, don't grind the axe yet. What if we extend what's valid for brain-stored info to that of phones instead of the other way around? What if NDAs apply to all company data, no matter where it is stored instead of wipping off personal data out of personal phones?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mhollis]

Company data is company data. And if a personal smartphone is used and personal data and applications are wiped on termination or if the phone is lost or stolen, that's a good protection for the company.

What everyone's missing here is that the iPhone backs up all data every time you sync. I know, I have owned one since six months after the original one came out. and I went through three of those, as one thing or another would quit working (the last was a bad plastic lens on the camera). I did a sync, took the phone to the Genius bar at the Apple store, exchanged my phone under extended warranty, took the new phone home and restored all data -- including the last 50 emails -- from my computer.

At that point, and with those last 50 emails as long as you do not reconnect to the Exchange server you still have access to the last 50 company emails from the restore. You also have all of the rest of your data as well as all of your apps.

So, note to company managers: If you are going to violate the Employee Handbook or write or transmit something that violates employment law, make sure that those actions are taken more than 50 email messages before the Smartphone gets wiped, else you may have to defend against the undeniable proof of your misdeeds that remain in your former employee's cell phone.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

"The C-level egos generally just need to be told "No. Here's your i-phoid-berry and laptop." If they want to push it beyond that, start looking for a replacement"

And is it you, the lower-than-C-level the one to tell them that? Or are you a C-level yourself, in which case nobody is going to tell you how to deal with your highly valued stuff?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Slashcrunch]

... but I would consider that an overreach ...

I would consider it more of a reach around.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[amicusNYCL]

That's a very sensible policy. You, as an employer, agree that if you want me to be able to work remotely then you'll buy and maintain the device for me to do so. If you don't want to do that, then the only time I'm checking my email is with my laptop (which, incidentally, can't be remotely wiped).

But, believe me, I understand: the company's interests always trump my personal interests. If deleting my contacts, personal emails, and pictures protects the company, or even if you only believe that it possibly might (or even if you fuck up!), I know you won't hesitate.

That's kind of the problem.

Listen, I have zero problems with the company deleting anything and everything that belongs to it, which includes the entire contents of the device if they own it. I understand that the employees agree to what they're getting into, I just don't believe it's smart for them to do so, and I think it's not very pleasant for the companies to expect them to. If a company wants an employee to work remotely, or if that employee asks, then the correct response should be for the company to offer to buy or contribute towards the device. Even offering to hook up their personal phone with the knowledge that anyone who screws up deletes all of their not-backed-up data is irresponsible. But it comes down to liability, all they have to do is get the employee to agree and, if it happens, regardless of the effect that deleting all of the employee's data has on that person, the company is free and clear. That's all they're worried about, I understand.

And that's the end of this rant, thank you.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dan541]

The company is allowing him to do it. They could just disable automatic forwarding.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[sasha328]

Actually, this is true for most companies.
At our company, I do not offer the employees iPhones, but if they bring their own, and want to use the company mobile number (instead of carrying two phones) then I let them.

They can do whatever they want on the iPhone, but expect me to protect the company info if need be.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[TheLink]

I'm just saying that I think it is a shame that when I remote wipe a phone, that I am also wiping out the user's data. This is an undesirable behavior

Not always. Some people also would want their personal data wiped if a phone is stolen or lost.

Would be nice if the phone can get remotely locked, so that only those who enter the correct pin can use the phone (e.g. even factory resets won't let the thief bypass it). But that sort of thing is hard to do.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jon3k]

I pretty much agree with everything you said. Where I work (mid-size company, 6.1k+ employees) we either provide the device and service or we compensate the associate for it.

As far as wiping the device, unfortunately right now, it's binary. I'd love for there to be a "only-wipe-sensitive-company-info" button but it just doesn't exist, so the best thing we've got is the nuclear option. This is why we should all learn a valuable lesson: please, please, please backup your smartphone.

Forget the fact that it can be accidentally wiped by IT. The reality is, for every ONE accidental wipe, I've seen at least 100 blackberrys dropped into public toilets or left at airport terminals.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[rah1420]

The owner of this smartphone doesn't find it objectionable.

I would much rather carry around a single smartphone than two. I have my apps in iTunes, my pictures in my local Picasa installation, my music in MediaMonkey. A restore is only a minor inconvenience.

It takes ten blown attempts at the unlock code to wipe it. And don't think my wife hasn't tried, when she couldn't key it one night and absolutely HAD to use my phone for a phone call. It shut down after five attempts and wouldn't allow any more tries for 10 minutes. So you have to be a real dingleberry to blow the password ten times.

The notice was clearly spelled out in the installation documentation and I had to acknowledge the risk several times before downloading the certs.

My only concern at this point is REMOVING the security, but I'm sure I'll be able to discover how to do that if ever I should want to or need to.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Voyager529]

I know you're using hyperbole to make a point, but here is the counter-argument...

Laptops (the most common analogy here) are more likely to be company issued in any company big enough to have enough sensitive data to merit the use of remote wipe features as more than a line item on a policy AND have road warriors requiring them over a deskop. 999 times out of 1,000 you're more likely to notice a missing laptop than a missing phone. I remember losing my Touch Pro2 at Six Flags. It's one of the heaviest phones released in the past few years and had a high capacity battery to boot, and it still took me 20 minutes to realize I'd lost it. It was a personal phone and had fallen to its doom off a roller coaster, but I had no means of knowing that for certain, and it was nearly 10 hours before the pieces of my phone were returned to me. Since phones are generally much more likely to be lost than laptops and they're always connected, it does make a bit more sense to have more cutthroat means of dealing with lost or stolen devices. A laptop carrying sensitive data should, in a perfect world, require a strong password at the BIOS level, plenty of restricting GPOs, and file system level encryption. Alternatively, it should require a strong passworded VPN connection so the data isn't actually stored on the laptop itself.

Also, i guarantee you that there's at least a handful of companies (i.e. your health insurance company, doctor's office, credit card companies, financial institution, former colleges) that consider YOUR data their data. If their phone was holding enough information to make you a victim of identity fraud to someone who stumbles upon a lost phone, you'd likely be grateful for such a policy. Even if someone wouldn't ordinarily do anything malicious with your data, the bar has been lowered from a crime of intent to a crime of opportunity. In the example listed above, I was grateful that my employer and I had worked out a deal where I got a separate hosted exchange account for personal use on the same server as my work account, and thus, he was able to remote wipe my personal phone. This made me feel better that an unscrupulous person wouldn't prank call or text my friends.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

My company does not give (or didn't when I put my company issued smart phone on exchange) any warning whatsoever that this is possible. Nor do they seem to explain that an iPad can be wiped if used on exchange. Not only that, when I was given a work phone, I was told I could use it for personal use as well since they want me to be available at all times in case of emergency, so I canceled my own phone and was happy to not being paying my own phone bill. Now that I am beholden to my tech overlords, I am aware that they can not only do this but remotely browse my files on my personal/professional phone. Long story short, my plan is to turn this POS off at night and get my own phone that will not be used for company use for any reason, not even calling 911 if a manager was choking. It's this type of underhanded crap that make an employee mutter to themselves about setting the building on fire.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal computer, then they should not connect their personal computer to work email [or Outlook Web Access].

There, fixed it for you

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

I am unhappy with both of these options... as a mail system sysadmin, I see this as an accident waiting to happen, and I want to know what I can do to make it impossible for this function to be used by me or any other mail server operator, so that users cannot blame us, should their personal phone get bricked, on accident or otherwise.

Apple should provide some mechanism to make 'device wipe' impossible.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

Not always. Some people also would want their personal data wiped if a phone is stolen or lost.

If this is a personal phone, this should be doable as a decision made by the user validated by the carrier or Apple, not a decision the enterprise can make.

Probably the best way would be to print a "wipe code" inside the battery cover, or some unique number, that the user and Apple would have access to, and would be required to authenticate the wipe.

If the phone is company property... fine... the company gets the wipe code on the invoice, when buying the phone, if not, then they cannot wipe it unless the owner provides it

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

But wiping everything is just inane. There is absolutely no reason to wipe pictures, personal contacts, emails, etc. This is software we're talking about. Just wipe the account(s) in question.

Indeed, there is not.

This is like allowing employees to work from home, using file sharing software, for example, a shared drive and Briefcase / sync software. And the manufacturer of the file syncing software secretly including some obscure 'wipe device data' function, and the manufacturer of the computer (for some reason) respecting it and tying the function to a self-destruct option, so the employer can right click the employee's computer in a list, click "Wipe Data", and the employee's personal computer/laptop hard drive is wiped next time the software syncs up.

And justifying it by saying sensitive files are stored in the briefcase / file sync directory. I do believe if the employer actually did this, the sysadmin could face criminal charges, by the way.

I do not see how "wiping an iPhone" without owner permission is any different.

The Exchange admin abused an IT management feature to gain access to the iPhone and destroy information on it. This could fall under computer fraud and abuse, unauthorized access, and using unauthorized access to destroy data. I suppose it could be a while, however, before a terminated employee can prove the employer caused at least $5000 in damages to them through the unauthorized access, and get federal prosecutors interested.

There should absolutely, absolutely be a way to wipe a corporate account off a phone. That data is the property of the corporation.

It's more complicated than that... some things in a corporate account are clearly related to the business and company property. Some things are not. For example, take a calendar.... people will put things like business meetings in their calendar, but Employees are also expected to put personal things in their corporate calendar, for example, they will be busy with personal thing X, so their calendar reflects it. The calendar is dual purpose. It is That person's organizational tool, on their personal device, and their calendar is used by the enterprise too.

So the calendar doesn't really belong solely to either... it belongs both to the person and the enterprise, neither really has a right to destroy the other's copy.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Myopic]

Don't most companies, instead of outright paying for and managing devices and services, pay a stipend which people can use to pay for their own phone? That's how it was at my previous employer, and my current one. At my current job I also get a stipend to pay for my home internet, because I sometimes have to log in from home to fix stuff. I don't want to carry two phones, I don't need to have double internet service into my home.

I thought this situation was common, but commenters here seem to be saying they all carry two phones around. Really? That's fine and all, I'm just a little surprised.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[hazem]

I guess I wonder why an email client should be able to wipe the entire phone and make it unusable. And why shouldn't the company only be able to wipe the email client and data. The rest of it should be off-limits.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Suhas]

My personal iphone is connected to a gmail account that I forward a copy of all my work email.

That is why I don't allow forwarding of email to anything other than from group mail lists to individual corporate accounts on my network. This, in itself, is a massive security breach.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[ekhben]

Technically possible isn't even remotely the same as permissible. Confidential data usually comes with an NDA explicitly forbidding stupid shit like forwarding every email you get out to a third party.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Americano]

Actually yes, I'm not sure why you consider that such an onerous restriction.

My company offers iPhone connections using personal devices - I volunteered mine for the pilot. If I lose my device, I'm more than happy to have them capable of wiping the device, my data included. If I don't lose the device, and they accidentally wipe it, oh well.. shit happens. They informed me when I signed up in no uncertain terms that this was a risk of using my personal device. I prefer accepting that minimal risk if it allows me to avoid having to carry around a bulky blackberry all the time in addition to my personal phone.

Considering iTunes keeps (optionally encrypted) backups of your iPhone automatically, what's the impact? Perhaps you're out a phone for a few hours until you can restore a backup if they do it accidentally. If you lose the device for real, not having to initiate 2 remote wipes (one for company data, one for personal data) might actually save you time and hassle. If that minimal risk is too high for you... don't use your personal device on the corporate network.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

I suppose it depends on the work environment, but we regularly deal with sensitive customer information (i.e. financials, SSNs, credit cards, etc) and this sort of information ends up in internal emails.

Sending an e-mail containing someone's credit card details should be a criminal offense. Anyone who e-mailed SSNs internally should go to jail for doing so. Shoddy security practices by people in an organization in no way justify the destruction of someone else's property.

E-mailing sensitive financial details of customers is an utterly reckless practice, and trying to "wipe a terminated employee's phone" doesn't address the security issue at all.

Carrying around such sensitive information as CCs/financials on a mobile device without strong cryptography and basic security is at diametrical opposite to safeguarding corporate data. And frankly, the organization deserves what they get if they fail to prohibit the practice or fail to promptly terminate employees who adopt a practice of doing so.

The simple fact is anything truly critical such as that should not be available on anyone's Blackberry, iPhone, or any device taken off of company property, aside from encrypted formats where the decryption keys are not available on the device without a secure authorization process.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

2. SSN, financials, credit cards > photos

No. SSNs and credit cards can be cancelled and replaced. Precious photos can never be replaced. Your enterprise has no authority to judge that.

Sometimes a photograph can be worth a lot of money, also, especially if the person is a graphic artist for another job, certain photos can easily be worth $10k or more.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

It is allowed where I work. Sending passwords through email is not. Sending confidential information through email is a fireable offence. I have seen two people fired for it.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[MaskedSlacker]

Are you encrypting your emails end to end? If not, losing your phone seems irrelevant.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

Their device, their rules. My device, my rules.

Just for the sake of argument..... "My Exchange server, my rules"

Things get a little more complicated.

You want to use your own hip, new shiny personal phone, in lieu of employment requirement of carrying the 3 year old refurbished hand-me-down company phone we were going to issue you, which you don't like for some reason? Fine, but you must get interoffice e-mail on it.

To get office e-mail on it, you must connect to the Exchange server.

As a condition for doing so, you follow my rules.

One of my rules says that if you leave, are fired, or want to stop using your personal phone for e-mail, at any time, your phone must be wiped, I will remote wipe if possible, but upon request you must immediately stop using the phone, not copy any data off of it, provide it to me within 1 business day, so I can ensure that it is properly wiped, after which time I will return it to you, within 2 business days.

Now, if I make a person wanting to use their phone sign a statement to that effect, doesn't that bind them to my rules, even though it's "their phone" ? :)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[dupeisdead]

So you want me to have to carry around a second device because some dev is too lazy to isolate the e-mail stored on my phone from everything else?

when you save an attachment, you can save it to other areas of your phone than the default. otherwise you wouldnt be able to do anything with the data itself on your phone. There is no "work only" section of your phone, hence the entire phone has to treated as potentially storing data

Re:we have the same policy at work

[ieatcookies]

In all the places I've worked the employee has never been required to have work email on their phone but should they choose to they must be able to be remotely wiped. My current employer requires that the phone wipe after ten failed unlock attempts. You don't have to do this if you don't want work email on your phone. This is very reasonable.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

This same policy does not affect laptops, so why are cellphones ok? There's no technical reason why the wipe doesn't just remove any data associated with the account being wiped, leaving your photos & other media intact.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[vlueboy]

Technically possible isn't even remotely the same as permissible.

You couldn't have put it better. Companies remote-wiping MY JUNK along with their junk is not permissible. An app with OS timebombs is a virus. Period. We can't put up with a feature favoring US-centric wipes, because the unbrella lets random companies worldwide wherever you may live (shuddering about China and Korea here) to pull that same move maliciously ignoring local laws that would give individuals rights over their own hardware that the USA blatantly ignores.

Company "security" is only ever taken to mean the safety of "THEIR" data and not MINE. Lawsuits: because we sign half a dozen contracts/EULA's to become new hires^W^W wage slaves. And THEY laugh in our faces when we wanna enforce only ONE of our own, called "constitutional rights." The US and the EU are the only places you can probably even go to court over damages and/or pulling a revolution like the browser-ballot-screen was.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Sabriel]

Weyland-Yutani will be contacting you shortly.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I work at federally funded research facility, and they don't give me a phone, but I chose to receive my email on my phone. So I have to sign up, and say, "yes, its ok that you wipe my phone in the event of..." Its a choice we make by requesting access to the facilities servers. No one is forcing us to do it, and in most cases I don't think they do. We have to actually request the service. Its more of a matter of convenience, since I may not be at my desk, since the campus is so huge. It might not make sense for a 1 floor business operating to do so, unless you're traveling a lot, in which case they should provide you with a phone or subsidize your bill.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if someone shows that list to the customers they will all jump ship.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

... or you could just solve it the way we do where I work: Everybody does it but nobody tells the IT department. Everybody's happy!

Re:we have the same policy at work

[RMH101]

So if you want remote access to your corporate mail, you do it on a company-supplied device and accept they have full control. If you want the convenience of using your personal phone with their exchange server, you accept that this includes the remote wipe nuclear option. The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not. It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens: it's people who go "Oh cool, my iPhone does Exchange! " and connect it to their corporate network for convenience that'll be affected by this.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[RMH101]

No, No. So if you want remote access to your corporate mail, you do it on a company-supplied device and accept they have full control. If you want the convenience of using your personal phone with their exchange server, you accept that this includes the remote wipe nuclear option. The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not. It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens: it's people who go "Oh cool, my iPhone does Exchange! " and connect it to their corporate network for convenience that'll be affected by this.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[dbIII]

Here's how this shit happens. You have work laptops, phones or whatever for anyone that needs them - paid for and owned by the business, under full control with up to date antivirus etc. You may even have a big budget for this and are willing to hand something quite decent out to anyone that asks. Then employees and accounting conspire behind your back with salary sacrifice (for something the employee should NEVER pay for anyway) and next thing you are up to your neck in Vista driven malware clogged pieces of shit with no antivirus trying to send spam out via your companies gateway (and succeeding if somebody gives in to requests to open up the firewall so users can send via their personal email and the admin lets them send mail out to anywhere). You can't legally do anything to these devices when the only sane solution is to nuke and reinstall, and it's hard to convince the users since half the software they have is warez so they can't easily reinstall. Now it's getting to be the same way with phones.
Personally I think if it's for work purposes and the workplace wants to assert some sort of control over the device then the workplace pays for it, but that's hard to implement when people want to chase after the next shiny thing.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Rich0]

My company doesn't require me to have a smartphone, to read my emails from home, to take my laptop home, to work on evenings or weekends, or to do anything that anybody here would object to.

They also fire the few worst performers in every department just about every year.

That means that EVERYBODY uses their personal phones for work, distributes their cell-phone numbers, reads emails from home, takes their laptops home, works on evenings and weekends, and does all kinds of stuff that everybody here would object to.

Sure, it isn't "policy" but if you don't do it you just lose your job anyway.

That means that I care about stuff like this.

It isn't a big deal - when I get around to it I'll just use a patched email client that handshakes with the server and agrees to wipe my phone and do all that intrusive stuff that makes corporate happy, and then silently ignores any such requests. It will of course confirm that it is doing all of that stuff anytime the server asks it to.

The only way the company is going to know if my phone is running the code that they think it is running is when they supply the phone - so the problem has an easy solution.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Rich0]

It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.

Why do you think the USA has such a high level of productivity? EVERYBODY expects their employees to do this stuff. Sure, it isn't written policy, but if you don't do it you "aren't competitive."

Why would the employer pay for an employee to use a cell phone when they can just fire the slowest worker every year and pretty soon everybody is happily volunteering their personal phone numbers to keep their jobs?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

but surely if you're taking pictures with a smartphone, they're not that important.

If i had a photo of someone on my phone who then died, i'd be pretty damn sure to print and frame it.

And i'm sure graphic artists/photographers would just carry around one of these things that got invented years and years and years and years ago, called a camera.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice comparison. Maybe that's what it takes to understand the argument here.

Imagine that every time you fired an employee, your exchange server would be wiped, and people were seriously arguing that this was right, because said employee might have sent some confidential personal e-mail through the exchange server.

I'm sure you consider this idea ridiculous. So do I. Exactly as ridiculous as the idea that the company should be allowed to wipe my personal phone. Any employer doing so should be fined just as much as I would be for wiping the company Exchange server. If I would go to jail, so should the CEO. Times three if you actually put in in the contract - "premeditated".

Re:we have the same policy at work

[asdf7890]

Are you encrypting your emails end to end? If not, losing your phone seems irrelevant.

Even if there are other weak links, that doesn't stop the phone being a weak link. Probably the weakest too: taking a phone is easier than intercepting email in transit (even if being sent plain by the MTAs) and within the ability of a much larger section of the population.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Rich0]

Of course, this is only possible when the employer doesn't simply provide the employee with a phone that provides secure access. Why would anybody jump through hoops if they were handed a working solution?

The problem is that employers WANT the employee to do work on personal time via remote access, but they don't want to pay for it. So, they write up an official policy that says that employees don't have to use personal phones, but they can if the essentially let the company treat it like a company-owned phone. Then they let the line managers fire the slowest employees every year so that everybody signs up to be abused.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Rich0]

So if you want remote access to your corporate mail, you do it on a company-supplied device and accept they have full control.

No problem with this at all, as long as the device doesn't do GPS-monitoring or some other intrusive behavior.

If you want the convenience of using your personal phone with their exchange server, you accept that this includes the remote wipe nuclear option.

No, the company should not allow access from personal devices if they care about their data. The only reason they do so is that they can coerce employees into agreeing to these kinds of terms, and paying for the privilege.

The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not.

Nobody gets to make that choice. Oh sure, they in theory can choose not to use their personal device, which just puts them at a competitive disadvantage. The kinds of companies that institute remote access policies like the one you describe also tend to fire the worst performers every year. That means that your choice is to spend 2 hours per day of personal time doing work without using a personal device, or less with a personal device. Guess which people will choose?

It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens.

No company "mandates" that employees use personal devices. Instead they simply mandate that employees be in the top 90% of their department to keep their job.

In any case, there is a simple solution - just use a mail client that happily syncs to exchange and communicates compliance with the remote security policies, and silently ignores them. If necessary just spoof a different client. There would be absolutely no way for IT to detect this. Their only solution will be to do what they should be doing in the first place - provide their own hardware and service, and then they can use TPM/etc to protect data. Most likely nobody will ever find out that this was done. If data does leak then the employee just claims ignorance, and most likely the corporate execs will be busy holding IT to the coals for implementing insufficient security, since at the end of the day they failed to prevent the breach. So, relying on these kinds of features is just going to boomerang sooner or later.

If your only goal is to check the SOX box or whatever, then consider it checked. The employer can just point to their policies when an employee circumvents the security, and after some wrist-slapping everybody is happy.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, rather than copying and pasting my reply to your copy-and-pasted post, feel free to see my other reply... :)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.

Isn't this conditional on people being aware that receiving work email on their personal phones will give their employer the ability to wipe absolutely everything from said phone? All's fair if you predeclare, but I'd feel that this is rather unexpected - doubly so for people who don't work in IT.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mcvos]

Wiping the email and Exchange credentials makes sense. But why wipe the entire phone? Why would you even want a email app that can do that?

Does anyone know of a good Android Exchange app that doesn't honour these wipe requests?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

It's to protect the company's interests should the feds come investigating

FTFY.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

Your work doesn't prohibit the forwarding or work related emails to personal email accounts? Are you allowed to do "work" work on your personal computers or from home? We're not even allowed to develop on computers hooked up to the Internet, let alone send files all over the place at an employee's whim.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they want me to have a device to connect to their system"

no one is talking about companies asking anyone anything. This story is about employees willingly connecting their personal phones to the company instead of using a company phone. Dont want to hand over control? Don't connect to the company's email with it, no one is forcing you to do that.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[houghi]

My hardware, my rules and the most obvious rule should be: "Only my hardware."

If work can't be done with the current hardware, that is the problem of the company. I will bring it up and suggest alternatives. Whether they accept or not is up to them. No reason to connect with personal devices.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

Every dev I work with thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet. Of course, this is why we don't get to develop on an actual Internet capable network, because the smart dev guy thought his "agreeable technical solution" was a good one, until all his code ended up at the competitor's dev box. Thanks.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

"Measures in place" to protect company's data that also wipe your personal data are a bit creepy.

I find people who put company data on their personal phones to be equally creepy.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

Sounds like you work for a shitty company. My work MAKES me check out a company laptop for business travel, even though I don't need it. So not only do they MAKE me use a company computer, it's obviously clear they understand they can't MAKE me use my own stuff and thus MAKE me take advantage of the company provided option, even though I don't want it. Maybe they are covering their ass, but at least they realize that they don't own us and labor laws still apply to even us exempt white-collar types.

There are good companies out there. You sound like you don't work at one.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

Wait, what? I RTFA and it sounds like Outlook is the culprit, not the iOS remote wipe feature.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[stewbacca]

Their device, their rules. My device, my rules.

Until you put your device on their network.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

I would consider that an overreach if you want me to connect my personal phone with your network and...

I bet the idiot in the article declined a business phone (most likely a blackberry), in favour of her personal "precious iPhone". In that case, she needs to know she's giving up control of certain aspects of her phone to use it for work. If she disagrees, then take the company issue phone.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[SJ]

I wonder what would happen if an employee remotely wiped a company server because it had some of his private and confidential information on it...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mognuts4]

This is the iPhone. Backups don't work as I found out recently. I had to reformat my computer without backing up. Install a fresh copy of iTunes. Connect the iPhone with all my music and apps and data on it.

Gone. Fuck apple.

Sorry, didn't mean to take it out on you. Just letting you know that with any other phone, that good piece of advice rings true. But we're talking about the magical, superior, Apple way:

Where when you sync your phone with the desktop software, it WIPES YOUR GODDAMN DATA OFF YOUR PHONE.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, seriously who needs to be that connected to their work email? If you do feel the need to be wired all the time, I see one of 2 possible situations where this might be warranted:

1. You are a severe workaholic and must be at the bleeding edge of any new email that comes through, even during times of intimacy, family time, vacations, or any non-work related activity... In that case you should take a serious look at your life priorities... lol.

2. You are single, and pretty much have nothing going on in your life other than work. So other than the intimate relationship you have with work, you probably don't have anything else to talk or think about. In that case, it's time to find a boyfriend or girlfriend ;)

Ok, what I said above is a little mean, and I apologize for it. My point is, they give you nights, weekends, and vacations off for a reason! Leave your rock pile at work and concentrate more on what really matters.. Family, friends, and fun :) So when you don't need it, turn your blackberry off! ... my .2c ;)

Re:we have the same policy at work

[silverglade00]

...one physical device with two virtual phone operating systems on it. I don't know how that would work for incoming calls or texts or whatever...

Two virtual phones = two phone numbers just like two virtual computers = two IP addresses.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Your email can get cached in obtuse locations on the phone regardless of anything the dev does. We're not talking about late 90's era embedded devices anymore - modern phones are more complex (and often more powerful) than computers from just ten years ago, and tend to have poorly documented OSs.

How is the dev going to isolate the data in all cases short of forcing you to install a custom OS on your phone?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Coopa]

I updated my Samsung Galaxy S a few days ago to Froyo, 2.2. Along with it came an update to the email app that when i entered my work's Exchange details it said that for this to complete the Exchange server needed 'admin' access. If i go itno a new menu in my settings it shows any apps that have admin, currently only this email account can do it. Now, i'm unsure if the connection to Exchange will still work if you say that it cannot have Admin access, but it does give you fair warning. In 2.1 it didn't do this.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[surgen]

And I'm sure you would understand how we couldn't possibly let you store sensitive corporate information on a device that could be lost or stolen. Right?

I'd be cool with it. It is actually what my employer does and it makes sense. I don't even know why any cooperation would rely on remote-wipe. A remote wipe seems way too unreliable if the thief is actually after the data stored on the device.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jon3k]

Unfortunately it's the best thing we've got. It's really worse case scenario. We also have the option of just doing a remote lock while we're looking for it. But once we've abandoned all hope we can just remote kill it.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[surgen]

I care more about protecting the identities of the people that do business with us then protecting the personal assets of employees that were careless (i.e. by not backing them up) with them.

So what happens when employees start backing up everything on their phones including this data? Suddenly your desire for control has caused sensitive data to go from only being stored on a smartphone, to stored on an employees personal computer as well. The fact the backups exist only increases the risk that this sensitive data can get into the wrong hands.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jon3k]

We're both generalizing way too much to have a real conversation about this. Yes, both the things I described and the things you described happen. Where I work (medium-large healthcare organization) we either provide or compensate employees for both the devices and the service.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[fishexe]

The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not.

Sure, but my whole point was that this should be clearly communicated, and often is not. Given that these "policies for securing its own data" go way beyond what is obviously necessary for securing the company's data in a way that is potentially intrusive, the choice to bring a personal device "to the party" should be made in full knowledge of the capabilities the company is being given, and the company is in the best position to provide this knowledge to its employees.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens if an employee has already connected their phone and then decides to disconnect because they don't agree with company policy? They walk off with your data.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mysidia]

No reason to connect with personal devices.

Some people like their personal devices and prefer them over a device the company would be willing to provide their employees with. Possibly the device provides additional functions that are useful to the person but the business sees as not worth the cost.

In this case, people should be able to strike a deal with the business, but it may involve the person making certain concessions for security reasons

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Dynedain]

Guess what, if you buy dedicated equipment for work, and didn't use it for personal stuff, the IRS won't bat an eye when you write it off against your taxes.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mlts]

This is something I wonder about. The last MUA on a cellphone that supported S/MIME was Outlook on Windows Mobile 6.5.

Why do E-mail programs not support client certificates and secure messaging anymore on smartphones? Of course, not everyone uses it, but S/MIME is better than nothing and at least protects the mail from end to end. What would be ideal is both S/MIME support and PGP/gpg support with support for PGP/gpg key maintaining.

As for encryption, it would be nice if phones had a special segment of persistant memory for keys, and stored the encryption key to the root and data volumes in that. This way, a secure erase just means essentially unmounting all program and data filesystems, a zap of the key, a new key generated, a couple mkfs runs, remounting the program and data filesystems, and copying the OS back from a read-only area. This way, the data is unrecoverable that was there before, barring a complete breakage of AES.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[ImprovOmega]

It doesn't work like that. AFAIK (and admittedly, my experience is with Blackberries, not Exchange) there's not a "mass kill" option, as wiping a phone is expected to be a one-off kind of task. Plus, you don't want to make it easy for a disgruntled admin to screw up everyone's phones at once on Friday at 5pm the day he's laid off.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[magus_melchior]

If GP or those unfamiliar with information security don't understand why it's a security breach, here's a very helpful question:

What happens if GMail is hacked and GP's account is accessed or has its password stolen?

Now all the emails GP received are in someone else's hands, and since they're business email, they are now incredibly valuable to someone who wants to perform corporate espionage, or get GP's company into a monstrous heap of trouble-- think breach of contract suits. It doesn't even have to be legal trouble, either-- I don't know many companies who need confidentiality that will do business with a company who now has a track record of being unable to maintain it. Depending on the region, a blog or a news outlet might report on the story, destroying any future business further (Japanese press will certainly do this). And all that before GP inevitably loses his job for ultimately causing the leak.

Now, Google-hosted mail as a part of their business contracting is a different story, as the business can now stipulate in the contract that Google is liable if there is a security breach-- and unless they're colossally stupid, they will demand such a provision. But forwarding all of your office email to your GMail account is a Very Bad Idea unless you've got yourself some really good encryption (multi-key, one being a strong password, the other a keyfile in a USB key in a deposit box or some other secure storage-- think KeePass with 2 keys, not 1)-- even then, I wouldn't forward emails into the cloud in the first place, because another security risk is a disgruntled employee with valuable business data. Against that risk, no encryption will mitigate.

My advice to GP? 1. Get that resume polished, unless your employer considers you irreplaceable (not likely in IT, unfortunately). 2. Talk to your employer. You may get fired either way, but it's far more likely if you keep it hidden and something happens that gets traced to your forwarded emails on Google's servers. 3. If you can convince your company (particularly their legal counsel) to help you, you now have more leverage to get Google to permanently delete every last forwarded email-- and even that may take weeks.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[magus_melchior]

Still, allowing personal smartphones to connect to a company's email service is not a good idea, because the IT admins would then need to deal with conundrums like "okay, which data is personal and which isn't?"-- worse still, if the employee is tweeting about his company, that's another can of worms to deal with. Best to not allow this practice by default and have the company provide smartphones to those who absolutely must have 24/7/365 access to company email.

In the meantime, those with the proper skills (IT admins or Exchange devs-- I'm not familiar with Exchange) may want to figure out how to selectively wipe company data off of a smartphone without touching data that isn't related to the company. Again, at a time when social network use is booming, this is probably next to impossible.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[SatanicPuppy]

Same with us. CC info or passwords or bank information or customer personal information...You can be fired for any of those.

Without that stuff, who cares?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[GasparGMSwordsman]

Your story is interesting but not quite accurate. First you have to be a HIPAA covered entity to be liable. If Joe Smith gets a random email he has no liability under HIPAA, even if it is covered information.

Second, a single incident does not mean liability. If you have a process in place to handle such incidents, they are not endemic, your response (as the sender) meets HIPAA guidelines (and follows your in place policy) then you are still not liable (as the sender).

Lastly, it is the person/organization that SENT the message that is liable under HIPAA, not the recipient.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[IshmaelDS]

Not only that but from the company's perspective what if they fire that employee. He now has all the info he needs to do exactly what your talking about. Doesn't matter if the company had no idea that he was forwarding the email obviously their security isn't secure enough.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[shnull]

this link told me to reply something along the line of : i have a $35 dollar mobile phone, it lets me call and lets people call me, i can even send text messages ... no company has access to its memory, should i read the article after you read this?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Rich0]

So, are you suggesting that I buy a second phone and a corresponding plan, and then take the consolation that I can deduct about 35% of the cost of that from my taxes? Gee, what a bargain...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

We have the same policy and will only allow smart phones to connect to exchange when they have the remote wipe capability. It's to protect the company's interests should a phone be lost or stolen. When the users sign up for ActiveSync they have to "read" the terms and conditions where it states that it may be remotely wiped. I don't think most people read it but when you think about the type of proprietary (and often confidential) data your email inbox has, you have to understand why the company does it.

We supply smart phones that connect via Active Sync to our users that need them for company business. They all sign a business use policy that is the same as the one for the BES users. For all the other users the ability to connect a mobile device to Exchange is disabled for their user account. If a user wants to connect a personal device they are also required to "read" and sign terms and conditions document that state that it will be wiped remotely if they report it lost, stolen or leave the company w/o proper notice before we enable that feature for their account. This prevents them from just connecting on their own with out us knowing about it. We also explain to them what the remote wipe means and the damage that will occur. Most all decide they do not need to connect once it is explained to them. At this time the ability to partition personal data from business data is not available. However, that it has has been rumored to be coming in the future. Until then we deal with what is out there.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[aristotle-dude]

Sorry but while it might be easy to use, it is not idiot proof as you found out. Why the hell did you not have a backup of your data on your hard drive?

Why did you not right go into the preferences and uncheck "automatically sync all devices" before plugging the phone in? It did exactly what you told it to. You could have right clicked on the phone in the device list in iTunes and selected "transfer" purchases which would have at least restored any purchased music.

Seriously though, no backups? Have you ever heard of backups for your home folder? No?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[aristotle-dude]

Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.

This is stupid.

There should absolutely, absolutely be a way to wipe a corporate account off a phone. That data is the property of the corporation.

But wiping everything is just inane. There is absolutely no reason to wipe pictures, personal contacts, emails, etc. This is software we're talking about. Just wipe the account(s) in question.

The only thinkable reason to wipe data outside of the corporate account is "you could have copied work content elsewhere," and that argument applies no more to phones than to personal computers. Hell, it applies to printed material too. Had any former employers snooping through your house lately?

No, the onus is on the corporation to restrict dissemination of corporate data if the risks are too high. Allowing a remote account wipe is a luxury afforded by software, not a corporate right over personal property.

This functionality is intended as a security feature in case the phone is lost regardless of whether it is a personal iPhone attached to corporate email or a company provided iPhone on exchange.

It can also be used when an employee is terminated or leaves the company. The employee agrees to a trade off when they request to have their personal phone on the corporate email. It is up to the employee to backup personal data in iTunes and that backup does not include corporate exchange information because the backup software does not back it up.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jc42]

... but if they said, "hey, if you install this software you can connect to our email servers" I don't really think it would occur to me to go check if the ordinary behavior of that software gives them root on my box. That wouldn't even occur to me.

Well, maybe now it will occur to you. ;-) /. does have an educational function, after all.

Seriously; if you're running MS Windows, you are vulnerable to all sorts of tricks like this. You really need to be aware of them. Yes, they're possible on all OSs, but MS builds them into the very OS. They've openly admitted that since XP, there has been a "feature" of the OS that lets MS install software, even if you have the auto-upgrade stuff disabled. So if you're hooked up to the network, MS can and will "upgrade" some parts of the system, and such upgrades can include whatever new capabilities they decide to install. And anyone who has bribed the right person at MS also knows how to do it.

In this case, we've all learned that merely connecting to Outlook opens a backdoor that lets someone wipe out part or all of your file system by merely sending you an email message. You really should be aware of this builtin capability, if you're using Outlook. And you should be aware that any other email package just might have a similar capability. And not just on Windows; it's theoretically feasible on any computer system.

Of course, if you're running open-source software, it's a whole lot less likely, since the code is available to knowledgeable people ("hackers" ;-), who often enjoy studying the source to learn about undocumented capabilities. When they find such things, they usually publicize them, and they get fixed. So the probability of open-source software having such problems is lower. But we've had a few instances of problems there, such as the release of Firefox some time back that had a backdoor. Yes, it was quickly found and fixed, but for a short time it was active. And we know about it, so we're watching for further attempts to get such things into our machines.

In the case of Outlook, we know such backdoors are there, and they're considered "features" that won't be removed. But now you know this, and you can take action to prevent it from destroying your file system. Read and learn.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jc42]

It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens ...

Actually, there is a bit of history of employers requiring workers to pay for and own their own tools. Thus, the "line men" you see out working on utility poles usually buy the tools you see hanging from their belts. Most of the companies either require this, or they magnanimously supply a default toolkit that's so crappy that workers "decide on their own" to buy good tools.

But I've never read of a case in which those companies reach out and destroy the tools when they lay off the employees. Maybe this is setting a new precedent. In the future, we might read of a phone or electric company laying off workers, and sending out a team to damage their tools so they can't be used if the workers get a job with a competitor. (We ignore here the fact that most phone and electric companies are legal monopolies, so the workers can't usually go to a competitor without also moving to a new town. ;-)

OTOH, it could be interesting if we had a few court cases over this corporate practice of destroying non-job-related files on (ex-)employees computer systems. It's likely that courts would consider this beyond the pale, and a clear case of willful mayhem and destruction of private property.

Stay tuned, and see how it all turns out ...

Re:we have the same policy at work

[DavidRawling]

I don't get it. How is the server (or the device) supposed to be able to tell the difference between personal data and company data? Here's a file: "Acme Meeting Notes 26 Nov". You tell me if that file is personal or company related. How about a picture, Image034.jpg? How does the server know if that's a picture of someone's kid, or a copy of the blueprint for some device? What if they've just copied 20GB of car part specifications to "/Personal/ReallyNotCompanyStuff/Don'tWipeMe/Music/Dire Straits - Telegraph Rd (15m).mp3"?

The fact is that people can, and do, use smart phones (and other EAS devices) for more than just one thing, and so do the bad guys. The server and the device cannot distinguish between personal items and work items (remember that any implementation that allows a person to tag an item "personal" allows the same thing for a nefarious evildoer is also similarly flawed). So for security's sake, it has to be the whole device, or there's no point removing anything.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[jc42]

There are good companies out there. You sound like you don't work at one.

One of the problems is that you often only know this in retrospect.

I've worked for a few companies that seemed to be very open and reasonable. Then I found that it was only the low-level managers that I dealt with that fit this description. I learned this when higher-level managers suddenly ordered something that was disastrous for us all (and in a couple of cases, resulted in the low-level managers resigning and finding new jobs).

Unless you're top management yourself, you never really know what "the company" is really like.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[ekhben]

Yes, it goes both ways.

It's irresponsible for an IT department to avoid saying they require the capability to remote wipe in order to connect a device. The article really isn't very clear on whether the iPhone owner was informed or not - she didn't seem to know, but wilful ignorance is in vogue these days, so there's every chance she could have and should have known.

It's also irresponsible for an organisation to require individuals to use personal equipment to process confidential or sensitive data. If you're in such an important position that it would cost the company money for you to not be able to check your mail in the bathroom, spending a few hundred on a company smartphone shouldn't be a big deal.

If your company does either or both of those, buy a smart phone, claim it against your tax, and leave it in a desk at work.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Kalriath]

Then you aren't connected to the AD environment. And, in fact, shouldn't be connected.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Kalriath]

If they were to do that, they'd have a non-compliant EAS implementation. And if you don't implement a spec properly in MS world, they revoke your license.

Re:we have the same policy at work

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Re:we have the same policy at work

[mognuts4]

I did have backups for my data. And I had backups of my music: *on my phone.*

Any other normal device would just keep them on the phone, the only place I listen to my music. Even if I did manage/listen to it on my computer, any other normal device would let me simply drag my music and copy it on to my computer. Easy, simple, no headaches: 2 steps--done.

Thank god I saw this coming and had all my music purchased in non-drm mp3s or ripped myself. I knew I'd get reamed one day. I only lost a small amount of music. My apps will probably get screwed though. Haven't attempted to restore them yet.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mognuts4]

Also too, think of this: I've been using computers for about 20 years now. The norm, for 15 or so years, for the process of syncing is to put data onto something else. So, for a 15 year old typical sync process, my phone should have copied its music onto iTunes. So why would I *ever* expect the brilliant process of when syncing with software, for it to *wipe* the data. See the problem here? Put this in even simpler terms. Since when did the term "copy" ever mean "delete"? Or if you're a UNIX guy, when did "cp xyz abc" mean "rm -rf xyz"?

Re:we have the same policy at work

[aristotle-dude]

You did backups "on the phone"? Do you also do backups of your home folder onto the same physical drive? That would be basically the same concept. No redundancy incase of failure or physical loss.

Backing up a C drive to a D drive that is a separate partition on the same physical drive is practically no backup at all and marginally better than a compressed archive somewhere on C.

I have an incremental backup of my music onto an external drive via "time machine" and I also periodically backup my music collection to a series of DVD-RW discs as added protection.

I assume that I am more likely to lose my iPhone than have a hard drive failure so it would be silly of me to use my phone as a backup.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[aristotle-dude]

Phones are portable devices and are much more likely to be lost or stolen so you should not rely on them for backup purposes. You are supposed to keep a backup of your important data on a "backup" drive and it is prudent to make periodic archival backups onto removable storage like DVD-R/RW.

You claim to have all of this experience and yet you did not consider an actual backup strategy. Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone on slashdot or any technical forum and they will tell you that a phone is not a backup device. Rather, your computer that you are syncing to is the backup device to your phone data and you should have a backup of your computer onto an external drive.

I have been using computers since the early 1980s in school, since 1988 at home and since 1996 professionally. Even when I was a kid in school, I knew about the importance of "backups".

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly work for a company that doesn't care about risk, or is ignorant of the risk. If they aren't providing company owned and managed computers for you to use, then it's likely they are just ignorant of the risk. I'd recommend either trying to educate management about the risk of having non-managed machines attached to the internal network, or if that doesn't work seek employment elsewhere.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[mognuts4]

Why are we even having this conversation? Any other phone in the entire world would not wipe music that was ALREADY ON THE PHONE.

Any other phone, I could just connect, drag and drop my music on, done.

Now I have neither. Your argument is pointless.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[aristotle-dude]

I don't know why we are having this conversation because on sane person would consider their phone a backup of their music collection because of how easy it can get lost.

I feel really bad for you but you should have had an "actual" backup in case your drive on your computer failed which it apparently did.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

I 100% agree, and I would never use my personal phone to check work mail, ever. My employer of almost 5 years would never allow that in a million years anyway. Nobody that deals with any sensitive information should either.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[RMH101]

Oh yes, I'm aware of this. Most mechanics working in car dealerships own their own tools (and if you think our toys are expensive, wait until you see what a full cabinet of Snap On tools costs...!)
The point is here that it's a fact that MS Exchange Activesync offers the ability to force-wipe devices. If it didn't we'd be decrying it for not offering enough protection for lost corporate phones. If you (for whatver reason) blur the lines between personal and work data by hooking your own phone up to a work MSX server, then this is what might happen.
For an alternate view, compare to Blackberry - those can full wipe too (which is one of their major selling points - you can hack around it on MSX but AFAIK BB offer the only solution that's pretty much bulletproof). Good luck adding your private BB handset to your corporate BES server without the help of the BES admin.

Re:we have the same policy at work

[Anonymous Coward]

You are the one who SENT the message to Google, by setting up your forwarding rule. The sender only sent the message to your corporate mail account.

Backups?

[Joehonkie]

If you keep a ton of data you need on your phone, or anything, you should probably keep backups. There's plenty of ways to have your device wiped out or destroyed.

Re:Backups?

[guruevi]

iPhone's and other iDevices take automatic backups on every sync so next time they plug it into a computer they get everything back. The remote data wipe is intended for loss or theft of the device, not to wipe remote systems at the administrator's whim.

Bad photoshop?

[bigredradio]

Is it just me or does the iphone in the picture of the article look really small? Or the person has really large hands?

Re:Bad photoshop?

[cappp]

You know what they say about guys with huge hands....makes their dicks look really small in comparison. I guess the same goes for iphones.

- Your sausage-fingered friend

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remotely wiping your ass?

There's an app for that.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or does the iphone in the picture of the article look really small? Or the person has really large hands?

It's photoshopped. The person's hands aren't white, so there is no way they are holding an iAnything. Just trollkidding. Kinda funny?

Re:Bad photoshop?

[bigredradio]

No.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[theripper]

I just checked the size of my iPhone versus my hand, the photo has the right ratio.

I feel sorry for your girlfriend/wife.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[fishexe]

Is it just me or does the iphone in the picture of the article look really small? Or the person has really large hands?

Dammit! There you go forcing me to RTFA!

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

They iPhone issued holding hands so that it can be held that way.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the phone is just lying across a completely open hand which looks awkward and makes the phone appear smaller than it is. Laying my phone on my hand in the same manner matches up almost exactly with the picture.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those hands belong to BIG BROTHER.

Re:Bad photoshop?

[Anonymous Coward]

stock photo from apple
original pictures of the iphone had much smaller hands in use
revised photos when it 'launched' had much larger hands
this was so people would think the device is small
that way apple didn't have to redesign the phone to be smaller
instead they blamed the user for having smaller hands

Re:Bad photoshop?

[balbus000]

It does seem that way, but I think it's an optical illusion. Probably because the screen of the phone stands out so much more than the area around the screen.

I took my iPhone out to check how it looked and it was about the same proportion. (My hands are about 7" from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger.)

Provisioning support...

[Microlith]

Sure, any phone or client that supports Exchange Provisioning will allow the server administrator to do it.

Incidentally, I lost access completely to my work's Exchange server after they enabled provisioning, as did everyone using Android. All the iPhone users have access still, and they're all open to being wiped once someone flips the switch.

Re:Provisioning support...

[brentrad]

When my Motorola Droid received the 2.2 Froyo update, it gained the ability for Exchange to remote wipe, enforce pin numbers for login, etc., using the stock email app. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe all Android phones that have 2.2 have this ability now.

Re:Provisioning support...

[Blakey Rat]

Incidentally, I lost access completely to my work's Exchange server after they enabled provisioning, as did everyone using Android.

Why? Android supports it. Well, 2.x Android does at least... I haven't used older versions.

Re:Provisioning support...

[plover]

We've been told our company has a very specific list of X policies that a mobile Exchange client must follow, and if a phone doesn't support all of them, they don't permit it on the network. Apple made sure that iPhone's Exchange client is compliant with as many Exchange policies as possible, but Google hasn't done the same. Every time a new version of Android comes out, the early adopters all cross their fingers hoping "this'll be the one, I can finally use Android for email." And every release they're still disappointed when the security people say "sorry, no, the Android 2.2 client still doesn't respect the 'foo' policy yet." I wish I knew more details about the policies they want vs. the policies the phone implements, but that's not my area.

Gosh. What a surprise.

[growse]

Company asserts remote-wipe control over devices that access company systems and data. News at 11.

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[amicusNYCL]

You think this goes on all the time, huh? Do you have a laptop? Can you use your laptop to connect via VPN or wifi (or even wired) to your company's network? Does your company have the ability to delete all data on your laptop's hard drive remotely?

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Company asserts remote-wipe control over devices that access company systems and data. News at 11.

Well, this was a *personal* phone and all you have to do is set it up to read email from MS Exchange. I think it's fair to think that that could be surprising to many people. While many businesses do make this clear, and there are legitimate reasons to do this, people should be clear on what they're signing up for. And in the case of personal devices, offered some assistance in backing up their personal stuff.

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[vakuona]

I can connect to the company's network via a VPN. I can't download anything from there to my PC. My laptop is just a dumb terminal as far as connecting to the work network is concerned. So no need to remote wipe there. Besides, the reason companies want to remote wipe your phone is because those are more easily lost or stolen.

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[growse]

I have a company laptop. It's got full-disk encryption as enforced by my corporate policy with a decent passphrase. If it goes walkies, they don't care about the data on it, so they don't need to be able to wipe it remotely.

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[growse]

I agree, the corporate policy should be "We support users connecting personal devices to our network. However, you lose some control over your device if you do that" *or* "We don't support connecting personal devices to our network. If you do that, and something bad happens, fuck off."

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[amicusNYCL]

Right, so the answer is "no, they can't wipe it remotely", regardless of whether or not they want or need to be able to. This remote-wipe capability of mobile devices is pretty new to the corporate world, this isn't exactly a tired, repetitive news item (especially when corporations start wiping entire devices that don't belong to them just to delete the data that does).

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[growse]

You're focussing too much on the specific security control. Namely 'remote wipe'. It's not about the ability to specifically remote wipe a phone, it's about the ability for a company to control its data.

What the company actually cares about is: "If a device leaves company premises and gets lost, can we ensure our data doesn't fall into unauthorised hands?". They don't need to be able to remote wipe laptops (although I'm sure there's software out there that can do that) because with full-disk encryption, you know your data is safe. So the fact that my employer can't 'remote wipe' my laptop is a little moot.

In any case, remote-wipe capability has been present in blackberries, which are used heavily by big corporates, for at least the past 7 years. I wouldn't exactly say it was new. What is new is people being surprised that a company wants to extend control of its data when it leaves a company-owned device and enters a personal device. I think it's surprising that people would expect anything different.

Re:Gosh. What a surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I see what you did there. That's sarcasm. Thanks Captain Obvious.

The news isn't that a company can assert remote-wipe control over a phone that's accessing information on their network. It's news because the majority of people who check their work email on their phone are unaware of the remote-wipe capability. On my phone all I had to do was enter the server address, login, and password. There was no warning or click-through agreement.

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiping someones personal data is a felony. I think it likely that the employer prosecute if the tables were turned. Hacking tools are illegal in some jusridictions, I think anything providing this level of unauthorised access would be illegal under German law. Guess they don't use exchange there?

Re:Nonsense

[tsj5j]

Would you prefer to be sued over loss of company data/secrets/etc in the event that you lose your phone?

I would say that this is perfectly reasonable provided they let you know in advance.
They aren't reading your personal data, they are simply given the ability to delete it when you are no longer an employee, or you lose your phone.

It's also good to note that iTunes automatically backs up your phone/pad/touch device.
So that actually covers the "keep a backup" part of the argument.

Re:Nonsense

[causality]

Would you prefer to be sued over loss of company data/secrets/etc in the event that you lose your phone?

If I ran a company and were truly worried about this, I'd have all sensitive data stored on a secure server that can be accessed remotely. Of course some care would need to go into how this is implemented but it can certainly be done.

It's amazing how infrequently you feel a need to litigate when you put a little thought into things.

Re:Nonsense

[jblakely]

I typically don't feel the need to flame, but wow: I don't know about the icrap devices, but in the ms phone world, your actually forced to acccept the terms of activesync in order to setup sync. and at any rate, there is no way that a simple security feature would be construed as "hacking" would german law also object to the blackberry, 10 wrong passwords and the device wipes? *disclamer, I'm a windows and exchange admin*

Re:Nonsense

[Tordre]

Would you prefer to be sued over loss of company data/secrets/etc in the event that you lose your phone?

If I ran a company and were truly worried about this, I'd have all sensitive data stored on a secure server that can be accessed remotely. Of course some care would need to go into how this is implemented but it can certainly be done.

your comment says little, essentially exchange is your secure server, e-mails are your sensitive data and the iphone is your remote device. You cannot control what the remote device logs into its own memory so its loss will have confidential data that your server cannot protect.

Aside from the remote wipe system how else do you propose one secure the data on remote devices that your vague system allows.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

your (sic) actually forced to acccept the terms of activesync in order to setup sync

By reading this message you hereby give me legal permission to extract your liver.

would german law also object to the blackberry

Possibly

*disclamer, I'm a windows and exchange admin*

When they outlaw Windows and Exchange, only outlaws will admin Windows and Exchange.

Re:Nonsense

[sjames]

Turnabout is fair play, they might have backed up some of my personal data on their servers, so naturally I have every right to wipe those once I am no longer an employee, right?

Re:Nonsense

[mr100percent]

I'm assuming the corporation is smart enough to give employees notice of the policies when they sign up

Re:Nonsense

[Lehk228]

if you choose to configure your property to accept security imperatives from your employer's systems, you have noone but yourself to blame if your device is wiped by a remote wipe from said system. it's not like they called up AT&T or Verizon and asked them to wipe your personal phone "just in case"

Re:Nonsense

[sunderland56]

Well, no. Wiping someone's personal data without their consent may be a crime. The person in question accepted the potential data loss when she configured her phone to connect to the corporate exchange server.

If wiping data was unilaterally illegal, the 'format' program would be banned, as would most install disks.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

no, because that data belongs to the company

Read the IT policy

Re:Nonsense

[Khue]

So in Germany, if you email yourself a list of customer credit card numbers from the employer's database, then copy and paste that information from the email to a Word Document or whatever the iPhone equivalent of said text file is, then that data is then your personal property and it's illegal to wipe it? Based on that scenario, a company that nukes your iPhone that you placed into their infrastructure, has committed a felony. Your counter example to my scenario above is of course, why not just send the list of customer credit card numbers to a web mail account? Most likely a company has measures in place that scrub emails with data that appears to be credit card related (etc). The difference with the iPhone/exchange scenario is that the email would be sent from yourself, to yourself and essentially would never traverse the front bridge web server, yet it would still "leave" the company to your personal phone. If what you say is true, Germany sounds like a silly place, let's not go there.

Re:Nonsense

[sjames]

And so the non-company data on MY phone belongs to me and so they have no right to remote-wipe it.

Re:Nonsense

[ImprovOmega]

It's not unauthorized. In order for you to have direct access to Exchange data on your phone, you have to agree to allow it to be remote wiped in case of loss or theft. You are explicitly giving permission to do this the moment you connect in to the system. You are in no way obligated to connect your personal device to your company's network, but if you do there are restrictions and policies in place governing it.

Re:Nonsense

[Rich0]

Employees ought not to be able to give consent to these sorts of things - just like they can't give consent to indentured servitude no matter how many pieces of paper they sign.

Otherwise you just end up with a slippery slope, and I'd argue that we've already gone past the point where things are onerous.

The problem is that if the employee isn't responsive to emails during off-hours, they are considered less valuable than somebody else who is. That means they get fired in the next round of layoffs.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with wiping just the work emails? Why does the rest of the data have to go with them? If the devs of the wipe feature want to be clever they can also track any attachments that are saved to the phone from the email to ensure they get deleted too. I don't see why the wipe feature has to be an all or nothing affair.

um.....

[Anonymous Coward]

She held it wrong?

Common knowledge for admins

[Jazz-Masta]

This is common knowledge for most System Administrators (or should be).

With Blackberry, you can remote wipe, or just lock the device and change the password. The iPhone can be wiped.

By default, whenever you connect your iPhone to your computer it does a backup/sync. Blackberry does not.

Most companies I know first lock the device with a new password, and give the user a chance to bring the phone in (or a # of days before it is remote wiped).

If a company is unwilling to provide you with a phone for work, then you should not have your work email on it. If there is some form of bill reimbursement, there should also be clear terms as to who owns the device, and what can be done to it in the event of quitting/firing.

Employees should be made aware of what is possible, including the ability to remote backup user data (so they know not to store questionable content on the phone).

Re:Common knowledge for admins

[Wyatt Earp]

"By default, whenever you connect your iPhone to your computer it does a backup/sync. Blackberry does not."

It does not backup/sync everything, it is set to open iTunes and gives you the option to sync/backup but the default setting is not a complete backup/sync.

If you have photos it will also open iPhoto or Aperture and give you the option to backup, but it doesn't do the backup automatically.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1386

Re:Common knowledge for admins

[Anonymous Coward]

>> By default, whenever you connect your iPhone to your computer it does a backup/sync. Blackberry does not.

This is why no iphone user has any merit in anything he/she says - especially technically.

Thank MS

[Anonymous Coward]

You are of course aware that MS is no longer licensing Exchange to smartphone manufacturers unless they allow administrative remote wiping...right?

Re:Thank MS

[Killjoy_NL]

I'd love a source for that please, it doesn't really sound that believable!

Lesson learned

[commodore64_love]

Don't integrate as it gives power to strangers to wipe your gadgets (or possibly even read them).

Kinda similar to how back in the 80s a friend asked my password, and he decided to "teach" me a lesson by entering my BBS account and changing it. I thought I could trust a 10-year-long friend but after that event, I demoted all my friends to strangers and don't give them squat. "Trust No One"

"apology is policy"

Re:Lesson learned

[Garble Snarky]

Sounds like you learned the lesson.

Re:Lesson learned

[Lehk228]

the lesson is that "friend" is a douchebag. i have acquaintances like that, they never got promoted to friend for the very reason of such behavior.

Re:Lesson learned

[Kosi]

Strange friends you've got there. Mine wouldn't teach me the lesson that I shouldn't trust them. Or what else did that asshole have in mind?

Security Admins love stupid user tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what, they can read your email too.

No brainer

[shoehornjob]

You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks. Work and business don't mix and this is a perfect example of that.

Re:No brainer

[causality]

You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks. Work and business don't mix and this is a perfect example of that.

This is sort of like the concept that "when you insist on using what you do not understand, and refuse to learn how to understand it, don't be shocked if you get bad results" (think computer security for a good example). It's like that concept in that it's simple, easy to understand, and people will go to great lengths to remain in denial of it.

Re:No brainer

[shoehornjob]

Give that man some mod points

Re:No brainer

[Rich0]

You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks.

Sure, or you just like to keep your job. Everybody wants to get ahead in the workplace, and they'll cross any personal boundary to do it. Those who do it the least end up at the bottom of the bell curve. In a company that institutes "HR best practices" that automatically gets them fired - at least in most at-will states.

Re:No brainer

[prionic6]

Work and business don't mix

Actually true!

Cha-ching!

[Citizen of Earth]

Tell them to pay you $10,000 for your troubles or you will be suing them and pressing criminal charges for hacking your phone.

Re:Cha-ching!

[amicusNYCL]

I'm assuming the response will be a curt letter informing you to read the agreement that you already agreed to, with said agreement attached, including an invoice for the lawyer's time to draft the letter and send it. Thanks for your business.

What, you mean you didn't read the EULA? Whose fault is that? Is that the company's fault?

Re:Cha-ching!

[swanzilla]

Tell them to pay you $10,000 for your troubles or you will be suing them and pressing criminal charges for hacking your phone.

Great idea. Unless of course the company has a legal department, or access to an attorney. There is a reason you have to sign a contract, agreeing to the terms/policies of your employer.

Re:Cha-ching!

[Anonymous Cowpat]

1) not everyone has a contract 2) not all contract terms are enforceable - ones which allow the employer to damage the employees personal property at will may fall into that category (IANAL).

Re:Cha-ching!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hacking? Its a legitimate feature, there for protection of company property.

What, you mean you don't care if someone got hold of documents and emails about the inner workings of your company that could cause harm?

Re:Cha-ching!

[davidbrit2]

And they'll just threaten to countersue for hacking/invading their network with your personal phone.

N900 FTW.

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually get to own it after purchase.

Re:N900 FTW.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it definitely the case that the N900 has no remote wipe (or similar) features?

I have an N900 and that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article.

I've been that Exchange Administrator before...

[hawks5999]

...and despite communicating the company policy regarding separation and removal of company data from devices, I've still had to hear the distraught cries from people who lost pictures of their kids, personal emails, etc. It seems excessive that Exchange Remote Wipe destroys data across the whole device (eg Pictures, Notes, other email accounts). I don't know if that is something Microsoft or Apple has to fix but it needs a fix. I'm happy to not be in that role now.

Re:I've been that Exchange Administrator before...

[hedwards]

I think the problem is that the company property isn't restricted to access by approved utilities. As much as I hate the TPM chip it does have it's place and in situations like this it's a reasonable way of handling it.

However, the general picture of it is that companies shouldn't allow employees to use their own devices on the company network, it really muddies the line as to what the employer does and does not own in a way can lead to problems for everybody involved.

Re:I've been that Exchange Administrator before...

[mr100percent]

I think blaming the tool is the wrong move here. I WANT the remote wipe feature on my iPhone to totally wipe everything out and not leave behind photos, contacts etc. Do you think letting a mugger keep your phone with photo library will not cause further risk? Heck, even giving granular wipe control (which would be a logistical nightmare to implement on so many vendors) could be a bad idea, I feel like that feature could be abused far more. You'll be hearing about CEOs who order everyone's photos wiped after the company holiday party etc.

The surprise is in the scope

[RollingThunder]

I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[fermion]

Which is what I was surprised about. If I connect to company email, then the company has the right to wipe the email.

Sure, a person may have company documents on the phone, and therefore it is safest for the entire phone to wiped, but one thing mentioned in the program was that the reason they do is not only to protect against theft, but also against employee misconduct. A remote wipe does not protect insider misconduct. As long as the phone is backed up, the contents can be restored and secrets exposed.

In fact, if the phone is backed up, it can potentially restored to an unfreindly device and company secrets exposed that way.

This was a mistake, but it does show a weakness in the megacorporate world. No one can trust the employees, so extreme measures must be taken. Likewise, no one can trust the faceless employers, hiding behind impersonal draconian waivers. There is no incentive to do a better job if one is just going have resources taken away, then the people responsible say they are not responsible because of some piece of paper. There is no reason for an employee to introduce effeciencies if old patterns are going to kill the effeciencies.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[fishexe]

I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.

Exactly. All the people saying "it's the company's data, don't like getting it wyped? tough!" should take heed of this point.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[causality]

Sure, a person may have company documents on the phone, and therefore it is safest for the entire phone to wiped, but one thing mentioned in the program was that the reason they do is not only to protect against theft, but also against employee misconduct. A remote wipe does not protect insider misconduct. As long as the phone is backed up, the contents can be restored and secrets exposed.

I think it's intended to protect against the "thoughtless/ignorant/stupid fool" type of misconduct where people simply fail to consider the consequences of their actions. I doubt it's intended to protect against the "sophisticated, deliberate, malicious, planned" type of misconduct because such people would indeed use countermeasures like back-ups.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[causality]

I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.

Exactly. All the people saying "it's the company's data, don't like getting it wyped? tough!" should take heed of this point.

There's a really simple way to nullify that point.

If a company wants that kind of control over a device, they can pay for it and issue it to their employees.

The only reason this raises any concerns at all is because people want to take personal devices that they pay for and then submit to company control over those devices. That's simply unwise. I'm not shocked when people do something unwise and get an undesired result. Are you?

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe I am reading all these pathetic comments.

Why is this news?

First off, if you are connecting to or using company assets (e.g. network, data/information) you are subject to their acceptable use agreements (assuming there are some).

If you accept to use your personal device (at your own cost) for work purposes you should understand the limitations that this includes.
If you can easily download data (e.g. email syncing via exchange) then there is a risk that this info can be compromised if the device is lost.
Naturally, as a basic measure, the company would want to reduce that risk (unauthorized data disclosure) by performing a remote wipe.

If it's done by mistake, well, too bad, restore your iphone from backup (you DO do backups, don't you? I would hope so).

As far as the info being "confined": first of all, there is no assurance that the info, once on the device, hasn't been copied elsewhere on the device. It's not like exchange data is kept in a special container, it's a freaking pointer on the flash FS. With the latest iOS you simply delete the device encryption key (takes seconds) or initiate a wipe (both are effectively the same).

Companies that do the virtual desktop infrastructures -- "bring your own laptop" policy (for cost considerations and otherwise) usually restrict the ability of the connecting asset to transfer anything to/from the foreign asset, but only allow for a remote display (think citrix, RDP, VNC, etc). Some supplement this by having Network Access Control policies that only allow machines that can demonstrate they have some sort of security settings enabled (e.g. recent AV signatures, firewall, etc) enabled, BEFORE connecting to a production network and being allowed to remote connect.

If you don't like this policy, then either don't use your own device, don't put personal stuff on company property, or change jobs.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[fishexe]

The only reason this raises any concerns at all is because people want to take personal devices that they pay for and then submit to company control over those devices.

Ummm...I don't think they want to submit to company control over their device, I think they don't actually realize that's what they're doing. I think they want to connect their personal devices to their work email and nobody tells them, "yeah, but you gotta let work root your device in order to do that."

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[Degrees]

So, I agree with you. For these exact reasons, I'm not connecting my personal phone to the system, and I carry a company supplied BlackBerry with remote-wipe capability. However, there is a wrinkle.

Tax law in the USA is such that if you make personal phone calls on your company phone, then that (the subsidy that covers the cost) is considered income for you. It is absolutely insane, and every year I hear from the phone reps "Bill XYZ was introduced to remove phone calls from taxable income status." Don't know that the bills ever got passed, though.

So if your accounting department wants to keep it's nose clean with the IRS, having a company issued phone is a horrible records keeping nightmare. Every single phone call needs to be checked for business or personal. Gah! The answer? Have the employee get a personal phone, and supply a monthly stipend. Tax-accounting-wise, it is simple.

But yeah, as someone who needs to protect the company information assets, it is horrible. You're going to retire after 30 years of service? Here's a going away present: lose all the pictures of your grandkids you took on your personal phone. It truly sucks.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[abigsmurf]

Lots of people save email attachments to their user space. Not much good in wiping email data if they've saved the spreadsheet with their confidential client data onto their phone's general storage

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[ndavis]

I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.

I agree I know someone this happened to where as soon as she left the company they wiped her phone and removed everything including her personal photos and contacts.

This is a problem as it was her phone on her plan and while I do feel the company should be able to wipe out any email they do not have a right to the entire phone.

My wife just had this setup on her Droid 2 and she didn't see anything about this. The phone was handed to the IT person he set it up and handed it back. No documents or warnings have been given and I'm guessing this can be done on an android phone as well.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just track saved sttachments. Wiping the whole device just in case is the lazy solution.

Re:The surprise is in the scope

[causality]

I think they don't actually realize that's what they're doing.

Acting out of ignorance, failing to learn about something by asking a few questions before they dive on in, or downright fucking with what they don't understand. Call it what you will. That's why I refer to this as "unwise".

If they realized what they were doing, I would not have called it "unwise". I'd have called it making a trade-off, knowingly taking a risk, or deciding that the data on their phone has no real value.

Just about every single technology story I have ever seen about someone getting screwed in some way amounts to the insistence on using what they do not understand and acting surprised when an unwanted result is obtained. This covers a lot of ground, ranging from this issue, to online financial scams, to computer security, and beyond. At some point I say people make their bed and lay in it. They can't be bothered to spend a few minutes Googling something or asking their IT guy what a process entails, well they're grown-ups and should not be shielded from the consequences.

As for me, I look before I leap. I make that tiny bit of extra effort. I go for the ounce of prevention so I tend not to need the pound of cure. A lot of people think they're entitled to skip that bit of extra effort, like spoiled children who think everything is someone else's responsibility, and are shocked when anything undesired happens. I describe that as a wake-up call. The people who experience this are certainly not victims by any measure.

iPhawn3d

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either a troll, an idiot, or both. Apple didn't have to allow the wipe functionality, or could have made it configurable. It's your boyfriend Steve Jobs who you should be mad at.

iPhone & Exchange

[jotaeleemeese]

A marriage made in heaven.....

If you don't want this happening...

[rennerik]

... use IMAP. Connecting to Exchange via IMAP doesn't enable remote wipe, but still allows you to access your mail and get access to the GAL.

But honestly, if you're needing access to a company's Exchange server, there's no reason why the company can't enforce a security policy, like a PIN or password on your phone, or remote wipe capabilities. There may be sensitive data in your emails or in your contact list, that should not be accessed on a device which has no protection (or even weak protection like a PIN). It's in the best interest of the organization to be able to remotely-wipe a device connected to their Exchange server.

That being said, if you don't want to give the company access to do that to your phone, then don't connect to Exchange. If IMAP isn't enabled, then you have to take the tradeoff.

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[steppin_razor_LA]

And that is why server admins shouldn't (and typically do not) enable IMAP. :)

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet run z-push http://z-push.sourceforge.net/soswp/ on your own server and allow z-push to get your corporate email via IMAP. The phone connects to z-push over the active sync protocol so it's like you are connected to Exchange, yet you are insulated from these nefarious deletion tricks.

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[Balthisar]

My company still runs old Exchange servers (hell, we still run XP and until last month, IE6). We *do* have an official iPhone app for accessing the Exchange servers, though. Wow, does it *suck*! Luckily we have a lot of Unix boxes that need email access, so IMAP is enabled. When on the company WIFI, IMAP is good enough. When off the company WIFI, SecureID is just an extra step.

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[amicusNYCL]

So that's why I met so much resistance when I was setting up a script to automatically check and process mail over IMAP. I thought it was still a standard default thing, but the server admin, who can design and set up entire Exchange systems, virtual servers, entire VPN infrastructures, etc, seemed confused when I asked him to enable and test IMAP.

Is there some major flaw in IMAP, or has Microsoft simply already embraced and extended it, and now they're moving on with phase 3?

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[steppin_razor_LA]

Some admins will not open IMAP or POP3 because they want to limit the attack surface in general.

An additional reason to not allow IMAP and POP3 is that it allows for a variety of mail clients to connect and pull copies of corporate emails offsite without giving the admins the "remote kill" switch.

Example -- you hook your gmail account up to your work email. It is now filled w/ all of your work emails. In internal correspondence, a CC or SSN number is discussed. Now a copy of that info is sitting (unsecured) on your gmail accou

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[causality]

So that's why I met so much resistance when I was setting up a script to automatically check and process mail over IMAP. I thought it was still a standard default thing, but the server admin, who can design and set up entire Exchange systems, virtual servers, entire VPN infrastructures, etc, seemed confused when I asked him to enable and test IMAP.

Is there some major flaw in IMAP, or has Microsoft simply already embraced and extended it, and now they're moving on with phase 3?

I'm pretty sure that Lotus Notes already embraced-and-extended it, though I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has done that too. That practice is a page from Microsoft's playbook, after all.

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some admins will not open IMAP or POP3 because they want to limit the attack surface in general

By running a mail server that's a document store that authenticates using the same credentials as the internal company network? Judging by the amount of backscatter generated by Exchange servers, I'd say it's also possible that the admins are clueless.

An additional reason to not allow IMAP and POP3 is that it allows for a variety of mail clients to connect and pull copies of corporate emails offsite without giving the admins the "remote kill" switch.

If employees have access via a mobile device, then by definition they have offsite access.

Example -- you hook your gmail account up to your work email. It is now filled w/ all of your work emails. In internal correspondence, a CC or SSN number is discussed. Now a copy of that info is sitting (unsecured) on your gmail

Really? What is the name of this company that is stupid enough to allow sending credit card info or SSNs around internally as plain text emails?

Re:If you don't want this happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny attitude. Why should I be expected to know about this ? If a company did this to my personal device it would find itself in court the same way that I would expect to end up in court if I wiped the companies database on leaving in case it had information on me that I didn't want them to have. People are not connecting to their work addresses for fun, they're doing it in order to be able to do their jobs better and often they have no real choice about this.

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[colinnwn]

Unless your company specifically forbids it, I'd use TouchDown for Android. I've set it up for my mom and it seemed to work ok. I couldn't get her tasks to sync, but I'm sure I could have figured it out with some more effort. The email came down fine. It isn't quite as chic as having everything integrated into the native apps on your phone, but the interface seemed serviceable enough, and it keeps more of a firewall between your work and personal life.

Many companies don't specifically check the client string. If they do, and you really want to, you can masquerade as an iPhone. It supports Exchange remote wipe (but only for the TouchDown data store), all your personal data on the phone will be unaffected. I have Prey on my phone to wipe my personal data in case it gets stolen.

Keep

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep personal items and work items separate. CRAZY I KNOW.

Re:Keep

[causality]

Keep personal items and work items separate. CRAZY I KNOW.

Yes but that requires a little discipline. That's something people will work really hard to avoid. They will work so hard to avoid it that they will put many times the effort into avoiding it than the effort a little discipline might have taken in the worst-case scenario.

Our university is even worse...

[Rhywden]

... they're using an Exchange-Server for all the students' email. Fun parts include: You're only able to install a Forwarding rule if you use the Internet Explorer (otherwise the button for rules is simply not there - something their FAQ omits.) SMTP does not work at all for some strange reason. I finally tried to configure my Android phone to use the Exchange account as an additional email account. That worked. However, whenever the screen went black to conserve power, I had to reenter my Exchange password to unlock the phone! With a nontrivial password containing special characters, numbers, small and big letters at a length of 10 characters, this became a serious pain in the ass. Normally, to unlock the phone I just have to swipe the on-screen button from right to left. Needless to say, I quickly removed the Exchange account. And it was only a month later that I actually got an answer from them regarding my problems. So, if our university of incompetent morons Exchange server means that they could erase my data, I won't touch their offering with a ten-feet pole. Fun fact: They're "offering" a user administration tool for all the dorms' routers based on PHP. This little "tool" does an include of remote PHP files based on the unsanitized GET request data. As a plus, this tool has to be run as root. Which means that any disgruntled dorm administrator could do a pretty powerful attack on nearly the whole dorm network infrastructure.

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they're using an Exchange-Server for all the students' email. Fun parts include: You're only able to install a Forwarding rule if you use the Internet Explorer (otherwise the button for rules is simply not there - something their FAQ omits.) SMTP does not work at all for some strange reason. I finally tried to configure my Android phone to use the Exchange account as an additional email account. That worked. However, whenever the screen went black to conserve power, I had to reenter my Exchange password to unlock the phone! With a nontrivial password containing special characters, numbers, small and big letters at a length of 10 characters, this became a serious pain in the ass. Normally, to unlock the phone I just have to swipe the on-screen button from right to left. Needless to say, I quickly removed the Exchange account. And it was only a month later that I actually got an answer from them regarding my problems. So, if our university of incompetent morons Exchange server means that they could erase my data, I won't touch their offering with a ten-feet pole. Fun fact: They're "offering" a user administration tool for all the dorms' routers based on PHP. This little "tool" does an include of remote PHP files based on the unsanitized GET request data. As a plus, this tool has to be run as root. Which means that any disgruntled dorm administrator could do a pretty powerful attack on nearly the whole dorm network infrastructure.

Find a different university. ASAP.

Re:Our university is even worse...

[amicusNYCL]

This little "tool" does an include of remote PHP files based on the unsanitized GET request data.

I don't believe that for a second. ..could you provide a URL to back up your claim?

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Anonymous Coward]

The being required to use IE to see the full-featured Outlook Web Access is because they're using either Exchange 2003 or 2007. Purely a Microsoft thing that restricts access to features based on browser.

Exchange 2010 allows full use of OWA (with all forwarding options, etc) on any capable browser.

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Killjoy_NL]

"Which means that any disgruntled dorm administrator could do a pretty powerful attack on nearly the whole dorm network infrastructure."

Can't he do that anyway?

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Sockatume]

Outlook Web Access's limitations aren't the university's fault, they're Microsoft's. You only get the "premium" web client that does things like searching (!) if you have an IE user agent, and it won't actually work on anything but IE as far as I can tell. As for the second, that's not incompetence, it's policy. An Exchange server can mandate stricter security than the client's user preferences and they've clearly chosen to do so to keep your account secure. There are similar configurations in corporate situations.

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Rhywden]

Should have clarified that - the network structure connecting and containing all the dorms (interdorm network, if you will), instead of only the network inside a single dorm (i.e. intradorm network)

Re:Our university is even worse...

[Trogre]

Um, no the limitations are the University's fault. The University should know better than to use Microsoft for infrastructure.

Re:One More Reason...

[AHuxley]

MS infects your Apple phone like a Sony rootkit and allows an employer to remotely wipe data like 1984 on an Amazon Kindle.
Welcome to your new Pink phone designed in California.

Call me crazy, but...

[KublaiKhan]

...why would you use your own resources to access company resources?

If the company intends for you to be accessible via email remotely, then they can damn well supply you with the means to be accessible via email when out of the office.

Unless you get paid for the use of your own resources (and reimbursed for the cost of obtaining them) then there is no sane reason why you would use them.

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[vux984]

...why would you use your own resources to access company resources?

Because I already own a $1700 laptop that I'm entirely happy with. And I don't really WANT to carry around a $450 corporate issued laptop that I would find entirely unsatisfactory (although to be fair adequate for the specific tasks the company requires of it). So rather than carry around 2 laptops, I just use mine.

Ditto for phones. I already have a 3 year contract with a premium smartphone; I don't really want to carry around the corporate issue 2 year old refurbished blackberry in addition to my personal phone. So rather than carry 2 phones, I just use mine.

In my case, the company is fine with that. I'm happy. They're happy. Win-win.

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[causality]

...why would you use your own resources to access company resources? If the company intends for you to be accessible via email remotely, then they can damn well supply you with the means to be accessible via email when out of the office. Unless you get paid for the use of your own resources (and reimbursed for the cost of obtaining them) then there is no sane reason why you would use them.

You're using logic to (successfully) make this into a very simple matter. It's a fine Slashdot tradition to pretend that even the most trivial of matters are full of legitimate, nuanced debate. Clearly you must be new here.

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[Kosi]

See, some people don't want to carry around two mobiles. And if you don't have to make outgoing calls themselves, it is a good pragmatic solution to use the own device for being called and to access mail and calendar.

I've been wondering since years why the big cellphone companies don't offer solutions for that problem. You should expect that today most "business" cellphones have two SIM slots, and that there are several devices where you can switch between a work and a private environment. The first is available, but only at places like Chinavision, not from companies like Nokia or SE. And I have not yet seen the latter anywhere.

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[Kalriath]

Nokia has actually released two dual-SIM phones, though they aren't the most awesome models out there. I'd provide a link, but Chrome has screwed up and refuses to paste - so look up the C2.

Re:Call me crazy, but...

[Kosi]

I don't need one actually, thank you. But there were times when I had wished that my SE T610 or later my iPhone would take two SIM cards.

So with google sync...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google could wipe all the data on iphones configured to sync with gmail, calendar and contacts. Good thing they 'do no evil'! http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252

Data loss != Bricked

[wiredlogic]

It wasn't "not bricked" because the data was restorable from backup. The iPhone was still completely functional after the data wipe hence it was "not bricked" because nothing was done to render it inoperable, even without a backup.

Re:Data loss != Bricked

[Anonymous Coward]

It could even have been left in an inoperable state (eg. wiped disk/flash no os image) but since recovering it was possible the bricking was not in effect.

I had a switch flash image go bad on me over the weekend and I had to restore the IOS image via the serial port and XMODEM. It took hours, but it wasn't bricked.

Connecting a personal device to a work network

[idontgno]

was the first mistake.

If your employer wants you to read work email on a mobile device, make them issue one.

Don't run your personal mobile's wireless through the company access points. Use your damn 3g/4g data plan for that.

Seriously. If it's your data, your employer has no business going anywhere near it or the devices that contain it, and you don't let them get that impression by never giving them a sniff of the thing.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[PhunkySchtuff]

was the first mistake.

If your employer wants you to read work email on a mobile device, make them issue one.

Don't run your personal mobile's wireless through the company access points. Use your damn 3g/4g data plan for that.

Seriously. If it's your data, your employer has no business going anywhere near it or the devices that contain it, and you don't let them get that impression by never giving them a sniff of the thing.

It doesn't matter how you are accesing your data - whether it's over the corporate WLAN or via 3G - if you have your phone configured as an ActiveSync client, it can be remote wiped from the server. Apple had to include this feature as it's part of the spec for ActiveSync, which they licensed from Microsoft. No amount of accessing data over a corporate (or any) network will give them the access to wipe your phone, unless you have an ActiveSync account configured.

If you don't want your employer to wipe your phone, don't configure your email account as an Exchange ActiveSync account.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[steppin_razor_LA]

Many people would prefer to not carry two devices and would rather submit their personal device to the corporate rules. There is no "cake and eat it too" scenario here -- just informed user decision.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[fishexe]

was the first mistake.

If your employer wants you to read work email on a mobile device, make them issue one.

Yeah, that'll go over real well. "I won't do my job until you buy me a smartphone!"

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[bigstrat2003]

If reading work email while not at work is part of your job, it's on them to provide you with the tools necessary.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[fishexe]

If reading work email while not at work is part of your job, it's on them to provide you with the tools necessary.

In theory, yes. In practice, there are probably a thousand job candidates in line behind you who will do what they're told regardless of whether it's the company's responsibility or theirs.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[bigstrat2003]

Fair enough, but there are also companies who won't screw you over. If I ever find myself in that situation, I will personally be looking for another job at one of the companies who won't screw me over. Life's too short to put up with that kind of bullshit, imo.

Re:Connecting a personal device to a work network

[fishexe]

Life's too short to put up with that kind of bullshit, imo.

I'll agree with that.

*shrug*

[Anonymous Coward]

You can only remote wipe something which connect to the internet and is not in offline mode. Even all the best iphone ipad, PDA, will not remote wipe if it do not get the remote wipe command. Which would not happen if somebody is motivated enough to cleverly remove any connection capability before going through the mailbox offline mode. And somebody stealiong it and not sophisticated enough to know that would not even care about the data, almost cetrainly. So it is really a useless feature.

Re:*shrug*

[nosfucious]

Let's not forget Wifi.

If your portable device is connected up via wifi, and not just via 3g, it will also wipe.

So, no Wifi, and no 3g. That's a serious portion of the usability of a device gone.

Most theft or loss of devices come under the "left it in taxi" or "pickpocket got it to turn in to crack" category. In this case the data on it is probably gone forever anyway. Wipe just makes everyone feel better.

Very, very few are a result of espionage or other malicious intent.

If you had malicious intent, you'd get the data off in the small window of opportunity, and work with it at your leasure. And you'd be working on the assumption that the device will be wiped at some point.

Compliance and privacy of the company data is a very real concern to sys admins and legal departments. Remote Wipe is the CYA for any sysadmin with portable devices. My iTouch is the only device approved (testing purposes) that isn't a BlackBerry for our company.

Re:One More Reason...

[bhcompy]

By giving a corporation control over corporate property(virtual property in this case, but established property as far as the law is concerned)?

I think you'll need to hate pretty much every company in the world.

You can disable this on Android

[Anonymous Coward]

If your on android you can patch this out of the email client:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/archive/index.php/t-729753.html

I did this on my (Droid1) phone and it worked perfectly.... I did test a remote wipe and nothing happened on my phone.

Re:You can disable this on Android

[Anonymous Coward]

But this article is about teh iphone and the crying babies. Nobody gives fuck about android. It's not COOL like iphone. It JUST DOES NOT COUNT. Only iphone counts. period.

Automatic Backups are standard on iOS devices

[PhunkySchtuff]

he phone wasn't bricked, even though absolutely all of its data was wiped, because the data could be restored from backup, assuming that someone had remembered to make one.

Simply by plugging your device into iTunes, it automatically makes a backup. This is something you can turn off if you really try, but by default making a backup is a standard part of the sync process with iTunes.

Re:Automatic Backups are standard on iOS devices

[jimicus]

Okay.

So - and this is a genuine question, I really don't know the answer - if my iPhone is remotely wiped, can I easily restore from that backup? Or will iTunes spot that it's been remotely wiped and dutifully wipe the backups as well unless I take steps to prevent that?

Re:Automatic Backups are standard on iOS devices

[PhunkySchtuff]

Now that is a very good question and I was wondering about that myself.

I would guess that you can restore it from a backup as the remote wipe is supposed to prevent information from falling into the wrong hands (ie, you lose your phone, or it's stolen).

From what I can tell, the remote wipe tells the iPhone to delete the (randomly generated) encryption key it holds that decrypts the flash - thereby resulting in the flash essentially being overwritten with random garbage. This is how it can securely wipe itself instantly without having to actually overwrite the flash.

I don't know of any mechanism that would prevent you from restoring from backup after the phone has been wiped - however I don't believe that email from an Exchange ActiveSync account is stored on the phone (at least no permanent message storage or cache) and this data is probably not backed up either, rather it just backs up the account settings. If your account has been deleted or locked on the Exchange server, then you can't retrieve your email but the rest of the phone should be OK.

Re:Automatic Backups are standard on iOS devices

[jo_ham]

You can restore back with no problems. The data that is backed up is device independent - you don't even have to restore it to the same iPhone, so it's not going to care if a phone has been remote wiped, or connect the dots and assume that the backups need to be deleted too. The feature is entirely designed to neutralise the phone's data if it is out of your control. If you get it back, it's assumed to be safe again - although I guess if you re-sync to the Exchange server once you restore from the backup, since it will put those settings back in, there's nothing stopping that server from issuing a second remote wipe command. I would assume at this point you would just break that link in your phone settings before doing anything network related.

Re:One More Reason...

[dasdrewid]

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spick-and-span

Also, from the wikipedia article on the product, someone did try boycotting it in 1999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spic_and_Span). I think that's stupid. "Spick and Span" was first recorded in the 16th century. "Spic" has only existed since early 1900s, wasn't documented until 1910, and even then was documented as "spiggoty" as a slur against Italians. I'd say it's pretty safe to say that when "Spic and Span" was created (1933 in Ohio), "spic" being a slur wasn't even on the radar for them.

I think the situation is similar to the word "niggardly" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22). People see something that, without any context (context like the spelling of the word or idiom...), could be conceived as racist. People take offense as something because of their own ignorance.

The problem is, you're not being color-blind. You're seeing color issues where there aren't any. You're trying to get people riled up at racism that isn't even there. You're not helping to stop racism, but you are helping to chill language and communication and encourage ignorance. You have, by trying to be on the right side of something, wound up on the wrong side of everything.

And there goes my karma...

High and low levels of the "rule of law"

[davecb]

She was in the 'States, which tends to ignore minor crimes and expect the victim to sue/shoot the culprit (;-))

You're better off in Germany, and the Americans are better off than some of the third world, where our American cousins and we send volunteers to teach the concept of the rule of Law, as in http://www.lawyerswithoutborders.org/Pages/Default.aspx

--dave

Turning the tables

[Anonymous Coward]

But honestly, if you're needing access to a company's Exchange server, there's no reason why the company can't enforce a security policy, like a PIN or password on your phone, or remote wipe capabilities. There may be sensitive data in your emails or in your contact list, that should not be accessed on a device which has no protection (or even weak protection like a PIN). It's in the best interest of the organization to be able to remotely-wipe a device connected to their Exchange server.

But honestly, if the company needs access to your phone, there's no reason why you can't enforce a security policy, like ... remote wipe capabilities. There may be private data in your phone or in your contact list, that should not be accessed by the company... It's your best interest of to be able to remotely-wipe a company connecting to your phone.

Just because you access company mail with your phone does not mean that the company should be allowd to wipe your phone - or that you should be allowd to wipe the company server...

Re:Turning the tables

[st0rmshad0w]

Just because you access company mail with your phone does not mean that the company should be allowd to wipe your phone

Tell it to Sarbanes-Oxley

Personal is personal, and business is business...

[Local ID10T]

If you don't want to risk such things happening, don't mix business and personal.

Laptop, VPN, Cell Phone, etc. Keep your life separate from your work. Don't do work on personal equipment, and don't use work equipment for things you want kept private.

If you chose to mix them (for convenience) then understand the risk.

Re:One More Reason...

[somersault]

You'd really rather a thief had easy access to your email and other personal info?

Having said that - when my last phone got stolen, they took the SIM out pretty much immediately anyway, which would stop any wiping from taking place until further connection to the net, or never if they disabled the Exchange account. They could then browse anything if they wanted. We had the IMEI blacklisted so the phone was basically useless. Hopefully the thief didn't manage to sell it.

Needless to say I now make sure to use a code to even allow unlocking of the phone (a swype-code on Android, so it's not a pain in the ass).

Android too.

[taer]

Shouldn't it be just an option to remote wipe the exchange store? Why force a pin lock on the phone, and remote wipe it? Why not just pin lock the app and remote wipe the email store instead? This applies to Android too. My phone forced me to pick a pin lock because someone in IT checked a box over the weekend. I immediately removed corporate email from the phone.

Duuuuuuhhhhhh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would ANYONE allow their personal device to touch the Exchange Server, BES or whatever? If you do that you should know that EVERYTHING you do on said device can and will be viewed by the Exchange/ BES admins.

Re:Duuuuuuhhhhhh....

[0123456]

Why would ANYONE allow their personal device to touch the Exchange Server, BES or whatever?

Because most people don't expect that reading email allows people to remotely wipe their phone?

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[Microlith]

I'll forward the TouchDown recommendation on to my co-workers that are using Android, however most of them are beta-testing software in development here (system level stuff) so they tend to get their devices reset frequently. I use an N900, so there's no real options for me short of my employer buying me a device, or reverse engineering the ActiveSync protocol such that I can lie and claim I support provisioning when I don't.

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Needless to say I now make sure to use a code to even allow unlocking of the phone (a swype-code on Android, so it's not a pain in the ass).

Exchange Server is set by default to force a passcode to be set and locking enabled when you add an Exchange account to an iPhone, if the passcode lock feature is not already enabled on that phone.

As I understand it that is a feature of ActiveSync, though I've never seen it enforced on my crappy, company-issued WinMo 6 phone... just my personal iPhone when I tested Exchange functionality on it once (via the same server).

No different than with Blackberries

[nuckfuts]

Blackberry Enterprise Server and Blackberry Enterprise Server Express have the exact same capability to remotely wipe all data from an employee's Blackberry phone.

Other ways

[PDG]

Wow, I had no idea that adding an Exchange email account for your iDevice would give sysadmins that power. Good thing my last company had ActiveSync disabled on their Exchange server forcing me to find alternate ways to get my emails, one of which was a tool that let me set a middle man server to act as a IMAP/LDAP/CALDAV server, sort of a proxy via the WebMail interface. This would keep the admin's off my phone while giving me full functionality.

Remote Wipe clears everything including the OS

[Deviant]

I am not sure that many here understand this feature. Basically it is not a selective thing whereby it only removes certain data or administrators have any choice what it wipes - it has one option and that is to wipe the entire phone including the OS. The process leaves it in a state where it will not even boot up. You have to plug it into iTunes and download/install the OS/firmware back onto it before it can even be used again. See the link below on how the process works and what is required.

Basically it comes down to this - Blackberries have always had this capability and it is part of the reason why they have been popular with businesses. You have employees wandering around with devices that may well contain confidential employee information and/or have the capability to send messages on behalf of the company. The solution was to give the employer the ability to wipe the device remotely when the employee reported it stolen or if they had to quickly terminate an employee in the field. Microsoft was told by business that in order to be competitive with BES they had to offer the same functionality and thus require it as part of the ActiveSync API. Many other vendors (Microsoft, Palm, Nokia) implement the API call to only wipe the company data and leave the phone in a usable state but Apple, for whatever reason, implemented it in a way as to toast the whole phone. As such, this has to be Apple's fault as others do it better.

I've only done it once or twice when an iPhone was missing/stolen. In one case the person found the phone 10 minutes later (after saying they had searched everywhere) and they did lose quite a bit of personal info. It also took nearly an hour to even get the phone working again (reloading the firmware). That is the chance you take with these...

Re:Remote Wipe clears everything including the OS

[Deviant]

I forgot the link - here it is:
http://premnair.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/microsoft-exchange-server-remote-wipe-on-iphone-3gs/

Re:Remote Wipe clears everything including the OS

[jo_ham]

It's done this way (wiping the OS data) as part of the anti-theft measure, to force you (as the thief) to connect it to an active network connection to get it working again, at which point it can be identified by serial number etc and can be prevented from being re-activated if it has genuinely been stolen.

I suppose it should be more fine grained - ie, in the case of an Exchange server wipe, kill the data not the whole phone, but if it is no longer in your control (the company, either through loss or because the user no longer works for you), assume that the phone is stolen from a data perspective.

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[mini me]

or reverse engineering the ActiveSync protocol

Why? It is already documented.

Re:Personal is personal, and business is business.

[fishexe]

If you don't want to risk such things happening, don't mix business and personal.

Laptop, VPN, Cell Phone, etc. Keep your life separate from your work. Don't do work on personal equipment, and don't use work equipment for things you want kept private.

If you chose to mix them (for convenience) then understand the risk.

Yeah, 'cuz creepy backdoor capabilities surreptitiously placed into standard-issue corporate software is the natural risk of mixing work equipment with personal equipment, duh. This guy was just as dumb as that kid in Pennsylvania who took his school-issued laptop home and didn't expect to be videorecorded and monitored by the school. Idiots.

Anyone who doesn't have at least 2 phones and at least 2 laptops is also an idiot.

Just in case...

[hoggoth]

This is a non-problem. You should have backups of your iPhone even if this weren't the case. Remote wipes from your office is not remotely (hah get it?) the most likely way to lose all of your iPhone data. I can think of a hundred more likely scenarios starting with dropping the phone on a street and moving on through my dog burying it.

Back up all your data, or consider your data already lost. It's just a matter of time.

Re:One More Reason...

[value_added]

How about

Recognising that "niggardly" and "parsionious" are equally cromulent is the mark of a learned man capable of discriminating.

Did that help, or hurt? ;-)

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[colinnwn]

I believe NandroidBackup will allow them to back up their apps and other local data and restore after a system wipe, if they know when the system wipe is coming.

That's what most people use when they are upgrading rooted versions of Android like Cyanogenmod. I haven't had to try it yet, because I'm on CM6.something. CM6.1 will be out soon, and I'll get to try NandroidBackup then.

Beta testing system level Android software? Cool.

Re:One More Reason...

[DJRumpy]

I would think most companies, like my own, ask each user to agree to this risk when they agree to use a personal device to hold company data. This is pretty standard stuff, and the ISS shop wouldn't even sign off on personal devices used in this way without that capability. It is definitely a feature.

As to the impact? Not much of an issue. Any iPhone that is synced in iTunes (the large majority I would think), automatically makes a backup when it syncs, meaning any new device could get a total restore of all apps, data, music, notes, etc, at the time it was plugged into the users PC that contained the backup.

Since we're trolling

[mark72005]

In Soviet Russia, phone wipes you!

Employees Don't think and Don't Know..

[wiredmikey]

Many don't realize that when they connect their devices (iPhones, iPads, Etc) to corporate networks they are handing over control to their employer. I wrote a piece about this back when iPhone 4 was released and one of the it execs we interviewed mentioned that fact: http://www.securityweek.com/iphone-4-enterprise-new-features-expected-drive-adoption-iphones-enterprise

I could go both ways .... no this Silly!

[Anonymous Coward]

on both sides of the fence over this one. but the blame here is w/ the "mail server - Exchange" - why the heck it would zap EVERYTHING on a device is lazy functionality. it's akin to an automaker forcing you to replace a car's engine just because it needs new oil. A joke - what do you expect from redmond. granted personal device should/could be restricted in what data they'd be able to access, but give the "average" human being - who wants a device for every mailbox(function) I liked one other writer idea - forward the mail (to gmail - wonderful) - i did for many years in a fortune 5 and would love to have know that I spread some "knowledge" around into the free marketplace.

Re:I could go both ways .... no this Silly!

[Kalriath]

Uh, no? Exchange only tells the device to remote wipe - it's up to the device to handle the implementation of that. It could simply nuke mail/contacts/calendars, it could nuke everything. But the Exchange server has no idea what gets done. This one's entirely down to Cupertino.

And any sane employer (mine is one) actually blocks "auto-forward outside the organisation" rules too - if we set up one of those it just transparently fails. But hey, thanks for pointing out that you, personally, are a corporate risk who should never be employed in any important capacity.

won't last long

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time an owner, CEO or other senior exec gets his phone "wiped" by an "admin", or other similarly equipped tech savvy employee, that will be the end of that policy. Things always look good on paper. Companies only learn from their mistakes. If all else fails, just kick the shit out of your current admin. It might not save your data, but you'll feel a little better.

LWN article

[Corbet]

For the curious, LWN covered the remote wipe capability back in September.

Re:One More Reason...

[sjames]

Heh Heh, he said ASSpirin.

Perfect Use-Case for Mobile Virtualization

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) solves this problem by allowing your personal device to have a completely isolated work VM that you use for business purposes. If IT needs to wipe your phone, they simply remotely remove your work VM. All of you personal settings and data remains in tact. Hooray!

http://www.vmware.com/products/mobile/

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

People see something that, without any context (context like the spelling of the word or idiom...), could be conceived as racist. People take offense as something because of their own ignorance.

I apologize in advance for furthering the off-topic-ness here, but I want to emphasize how right you are and how stupid it is when people do this.

One of my "favorites" is when someone complains that the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive because it is derived from a law permitting a man to beat his wife with a stick provided the stick is no bigger around than his thumb. This is flat-out fiction. "Rule of thumb" comes from, like, holding your thumb up to a painting. Anyone who gets offended by this phrase is being a willfully ignorant and shrill idiot, not to mention discrediting whatever quasi-feminist message they're trying to advance.

The only one worse than that, IMHO, is the insane notion that the word "picnic" derives from "pick-a-nigger", as in, "Who are we lynching for entertainment while we eat outdoors today?" Do we even need to go to Snopes for that one? That doesn't even qualify as an urban legend; that's just old-school linguistic trolling.

</rant>

What about laptops?

[lullabud]

What's so special about a phone that they get extra special wipe privileges? Can an Exchange admin remote-wipe my laptop if I have it hooked up to my corporate account?

No.

Why my phone then?

Re:What about laptops?

[schwit1]

It's possible if the admin has connectivity. There's many remote access and remote admin tools, free and otherwise.

Re:What about laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so special about a phone that they get extra special wipe privileges? Can an Exchange admin remote-wipe my laptop if I have it hooked up to my corporate account?

No.

Why my phone then?

Most laptops don't have built-in encryption.

At $WORK we're starting to look at using Windows 7's BitKeeper functionality, so if the laptop is lost or stolen we don't have to worry about people getting to the data (of course I/O will be slower). Of course if you leave the company your account is disabled, so you can no longer log in and decrypt the data if you decide to "keep" the laptop. Similarly if you're still with the company, but incapacitated in some way, the data is still accessible via a secondary key available to admins so we're not dependent on an individual giving out their passphrase.

Since the entire stack of phones is controlled by one company it's easier for them to integrate encryption, but don't worry, laptops are getting there.

Re:What about laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, actually. If you hook up a laptop to a corporate domain it is pretty trivial to remote-wipe all data on it, leaving only the OS intact. This should be obvious, hooking up to the domain gives the domain administrator the highest level of access to your laptop, and from there they can push policies to open up remote access and allow them to run a script that will delete things. There may be a faster way, but it's possible as soon as you hook up to a domain.

Clearly Explain the Remote Wipe Policy to the User

[cshbell]

I suspect many of the misgivings about remote-wipe policies have to do with the clarity of explanation. Explain to users clearly what ‘remote wipe’ means, and what they can do to protect their data.

Just today, I wrote a new document for our users about our remote wipe policy and how, with iOS 4.2, they can too thanks to Find My iPhone. Here’s what I wrote, under the heading ‘A brief but important note about your privacy and data:’

“It’s important you know that the locating feature of Find My iPhone is tied to your own, personal Apple ID. This feature is not accessible by anyone else in the company, including the IT department, and cannot be used to track or determine your location. We respect your privacy.

“On the other hand, the IT department can immediately erase your iPhone’s data should it be lost or stolen. This would cause everything on your iPhone to be erased, including pictures, music, and apps — not just company data. Therefore, we recommend you connect and sync your iPhone to iTunes regularly to ensure that any personal data on your iPhone is backed up.”

Companies have a right to secure their smartphones —there’s a lot of data on them. End users have a right to protect their personal, non-company data. These are not mutually exclusive. Can we agree?

Idiotic policy

[brunes69]

I am not sure if you comprehend the idiocy of this policy - saying your employees are responsible for their own data backups in case you have to remote wipe the phone "to ensure data is kept safe"

How are you going to ensure that these employee data backups are kept safe? After all they will also contain all the phones contacts and confidential emails. Knowing most people they will just be on some random laptop or out in the clound someplace unencrypted.

The point being IMO if a company is going to enforce remote wiping they damn well also enforce their own backup policies and also enforce that the phone owner IS NOT ALLOWED to make their own backups.

Re:Idiotic policy

[steppin_razor_LA]

iPhone backups don't work the way you describe. When you plug your iPhone into your computer + iTunes, it makes a backup of your settings, photos, and media.

No corporate data is backed up and if your phone is remote-wiped (or even if the user wipes it), no corporate data is wiped.

In other words, there is no need for the organization to backup the phones in any way shape or form. The only reason to backup the phones is to preserve user-specific data.

Gmail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I sync my iPhone to gmail via exchange. That that also give gmail to power to kill my data??

Re:Gmail?

[Kalriath]

Actually, yes.

Re:One More Reason...

[Korin43]

I actually thought their response was fairly interesting. It you troll by making people post interesting things, then by all means continue.

What...the...fuck????

[Anonymous Coward]

How in god's name does this garbage make it to slashdot's front page. Are you _fucking_ kidding me?

Re:Do you have the same policy for PCs

[TurtleBay]

This is why most companies use virtual desktop such on VPNs when remote computers log in. The actual data can be accessed without being permanently stored on the remote PC which is logging in. Many large corporations have specific rule regarding thumb drives. For example, my last employer only allowed files which cleared compliance for client consumption to be put on thumb drives.

Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act apply?

[schwit1]

If I deleted files on my employer's computers with malicious intent it is a crime. Why isn't this the same thing?

The employer is given permission to add and remove emails, contacts and calendar items. That's it. What's happening here is scorched earth.

Re:Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act apply?

[Myopic]

I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine the difference is the written employment contract and explicit written company policies. If you have a contract giving you the right to erase data from company computers, then you probably won't get prosecuted for doing so.

Google Exchange interface

[Steeltoe]

This will also work for Google when you connect through the Exchange interface. You know, the one that sync calendar, email and address book in one sweep. So most geeks using iPhone is using that.

Just one more reason never to buy iPhone, Macbook Pro or iPod again.. Yeah, I'm disgruntled owner of all these and more junk, like Apple's Wifi offerings.

Re:Google Exchange interface

[RMH101]

Can you provide an instance where Google has ever remote wiped a phone synching to Gmail by Exchange Activesync, or point to a policy where you can request this? I don't believe it's ever happened.

Re:Google Exchange interface

[Steeltoe]

Just the fact that it is made possible on iPhone through the Exchange interface connecting to Google is enough.

Having such an interface is plain bullshit security, and is just one more reason to the piles of reason, never for me to buy any Apple product ever again.

However, users are ignorant, therefore in bliss.

Re:Personal is personal, and business is business.

[Local ID10T]

I did not call anyone an idiot... although you did, repeatedly.

I said that mixing business and personal is to be avoided, and that if you choose to do it you should know the risks first.

restore from backups

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the company's data, not your personal data, and they have measures in place to protect it.

No it's not. He was talking about them wiping all your personal data. "Measures in place" to protect company's data that also wipe your personal data are a bit creepy.

Most smart phones don't have provisions to tell which bits are personal and which are business, so the wipe is all or nothing.

If your personal stuff gets wiped just restore it from backups. You do take backups, right? In case the phone gets dropped or lost? We all know backups are important, right?

Re:Personal is personal, and business is business.

[fishexe]

I did not call anyone an idiot... although you did, repeatedly.

You're right, I'm more blunt than you are.

Re:One More Reason...

[CohibaVancouver]

MS infects your Apple phone like a Sony rootkit

Bzzt. Wrong. This is an *Apple* API in iOS that third parties can call.

http://connectedplanetonline.com/business_services/news/apple-mdm-ios4-062210/

then..don't...use...your...personal..phone?

[SuperBanana]

I don't know if it's true with your company, but I would consider that an overreach if you want me to connect my personal phone with your network and give you the ability to delete all of my pictures and other personal data solely at your discretion.

It's not connecting your personal phone "with their network". You're connecting with, synchronizing, and providing the ability to send email from, an email account your employer provides for work purposes. Those are radically different things.

This is a non-issue if you don't configure your personal phone to connect to your employer's email system, which you probably shouldn't be doing anyway for a variety of reasons. Example #1: If it's necessary for your job, your employer should be paying for it. Example #2: If it's not necessary, have some work-life separation and don't check your work email from your personal phone.

I know a number of people that carry a blackberry or smartphone for work, and a non-smartphone or iPhone/Android phone for personal use. Among other things, it's the ultimate level of control over whether or not you can be reached via such a device, billing, voicemail, separate numbers, etc.

Re:then..don't...use...your...personal..phone?

[amicusNYCL]

It's not connecting your personal phone "with their network". You're connecting with, synchronizing, and providing the ability to send email from, an email account your employer provides for work purposes.

Well, if you want to be pedantic then I meant connecting to their "business network", not just a LAN. That would include things like connecting with, synchronizing, and providing the ability to send email from, an email account the employer provides for work purposes.

That's not what "bricked" means

[dwightk]

and as far as I can tell that's not even the usual ignorant slashdot poster's wrong idea about what bricked means. It's a whole new level of wrong.

Re:One More Reason...

[AHuxley]

Your data is still gone, *Apple* API, MS, Amazon ... the trend would be to have a dumb phone for work belonging to your master and a Linux phone for your real life. A dual boot phone? One section for your boss, one for you to enjoy on the way to and from work?

Re:One More Reason...

[Kaenneth]

How about not feeding the trolls?

Well if it is security setting for Exchange Server

[TavisJohn]

Then the simple solution is to not use your personal phone to check your business e-mail. If my employer wants me to check my e-mail when I am out and about, then they can provide me with the equipment to do so. Otherwise I will not use my personal phone to check my business e-mail.

Re:One More Reason...

[Myopic]

I heard of a group which tried to call an event a picnic until someone complained (black slur). They then changed it to an outing until someone complained (gay slur). I think there was a third example of a word which garnered a complaint, so they said screw it and changed it back to a picnic. Awesome.

Re:One More Reason...

[plover]

We had the IMEI blacklisted so the phone was basically useless. Hopefully the thief didn't manage to sell it.

I suspect the thief traded it for one or two hits of their drug of choice, but not much more than that. Cell phone blacklisting may keep it from being reused in America, but that's ineffective in the countries where that phone was likely to end up.

So I've heard.

Re:One More Reason...

[plover]

Any iPhone that is synced in iTunes (the large majority I would think), automatically makes a backup when it syncs, meaning any new device could get a total restore of all apps, data, music, notes, etc, at the time it was plugged into the users PC that contained the backup.

But I don't think this extends to include jailbreaking itself, nor any jailbroken apps. And what about jailbroken app data?

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

seems more like an amazing troll fail to me...

Disable this "feature"

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://ksmtkmr.blogspot.com/2010/06/speed-up-iphoneitouch.html you can disable this horribly abusive "feature" by not running the "obliteration" daemon:

com.apple.mobile.obliteration.plist - This daemon wipes the data partition of your device. (Source) This will be used if you remotely wipe your phone via Exchange, or if you use Settings > General > Reset, or if you set your device to wipe itself after a certain number of failed passcode entries. If you don't use these features, you can delete this daemon.

See also: http://code.google.com/p/chronicdev/wiki/MobileObliterator

Seriously...

[phreakincool]

The Bill Gates as Borg icon needs to be changed to Ballmer as Borg. Its way past time.

Re:Do you have the same policy for PCs

[mysidia]

"Wipe Device" is no security strategy for preventing an employee from keeping data. It solves a specific problem, and dealing with employees that are leaving is not the problem it solves. The problem it addresses is destroying data on a stolen device, before the thief can have time to disseminate it. An employee that owns the device and has had the stuff on it, has already had plenty of time to disseminate it and make any extra immune-to-wipe-feature copies that they had wanted.

This is why most companies use virtual desktop such on VPNs when remote computers log in. The actual data can be accessed without being permanently stored on the remote PC which is logging in.

Nevertheless, the user might store any data they want by taking screenshots, taking hard copies, transferring files, or by using copy and paste.

I suppose if they wanted to capture everything, they could get a converter box to hook their monitor into, with dual outputs.... one output to the computer display, and another output to a High-Def TV recording device, e.g. firewire connection to a HD camcorder.

Presumably, a high resolution recording of whatever was displayed on the monitor could be used (given sufficient time) to reconstruct any data that had been viewed later

Re:One More Reason...

[MaskedSlacker]

For the first time I've found an issue for which I have no sympathy for jailbreakers--if you engage in unsupported uses, you don't get to complain when shit accidentally breaks them (as opposed to when Apple intentionally and maliciously breaks them with new iOS updates).

Can google wipe my phone?

[myxiplx]

So if this is tied to Activesync, does that mean google can wipe my phone now?

Activesync is the way everyone I know connects to gmail to synchronise calendars as well as email, I wasn't aware that I was granting remote wipe privileges to google as I set this up.

Sure, it's unlikely to happen, but it shouldn't even be possible! Stuff like that is an accident waiting to happen.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[jimicus]

If you're using Google for Domains Premier Edition (ie. the one you pay for), and very likely Educational (seeing as that's basically Premier only it's offered free to educational institutions), the answer is "yes".

The admin can, through the user control panel, click on a user and right at the bottom is a list of all supported smartphones they've connected with and the option to remotely wipe them individually. IIRC, you can remotely wipe iPhones but for some reason not Android phones. I know of at least one user with a Blackberry I can't see a wipe option for, but it's possible they've configured it to get email via IMAP.

I'm not sure if Google have updated their API to support this - if they have, it'd be reasonably trivial to write a Python script that automagically wiped all devices a user had ever used immediately before closing their account.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[myxiplx]

No, I don't mean is there a setting to do this. I mean, just by using Activesync to connect to a free gmail account, is my phone granting remote wipe privileges to google?

They probably haven't implemented it, and I do trust google more than most companies, but I still don't like the thought of my email provider having any kind of remote wipe ability, purely by virtue of the connection type being used.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[jimicus]

I'm not sure a free gmail account actually uses ActiveSync (I'd expect it to use IMAP), but I can't imagine why not.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[welshie]

ActiveSync is available for all Google Accounts, and is their preferred sync method: From http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ On most devices, Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your device, existing data may be removed from your phone. Please make sure to back up before you set up Google Sync. Please note that administrative security controls are only available for Google Apps Premier and Education customers. Also, at this time not all N60 devices are supported with this feature. See the Google Sync Help Center for more information.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[Rich0]

Android now supports remote wipe. Just google for DevicePolicyManager. Their implementation does make it clear to the phone user that they're granting that permission to an app.

Oh, and doing similar grepping of the source will make it fairly easy to patch your phone so that it tells your corporate email program, "oh yeah, we're locked down like fort knox, the remote-wipe is on a hair trigger, you're the boss, and the device times-out in 10 seconds with a 32-char alphanumeric password set to self-destruct on one failed attempt" while the device silently ignores whatever security policies the program commands it to install.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[jimicus]

Funny, the user I have who uses Android - their device doesn't show up as one I can remote wipe. 'Course, it's entirely possible their device is connecting via IMAP.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[Rich0]

Or, they own one of the android phones that fall into the 50% or so that don't run android v2.2.

If you open imap access, then of course that is possible as well.

Re:Can google wipe my phone?

[Kalriath]

As I understand it, you're asking if it's possible, not if they've ever done it. In which case, yes. Google can wipe your phone.

Re:One More Reason...

[m.alessandrini]

I would say: one more reason to prefer free software, if someone needs more reasons. Simply reading Slashdot summaries gives you a couple of reasons a day.

Re:One More Reason...

[arndawg]

The real solution is to do backups all the time. Not only when you see some stupid article on slashdot on just another way you can lose data.

Just nasty

[bradley13]

If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here. However this is a nasty policy. You know that people have masses of personal data on their phones, you know that most people don't do regular backups, and you know that most people are not aware of (or are going to forget about) such a policy.

Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.

Re:Just nasty

[Rich0]

If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here.

Just like indentured servitude. Sure, it looks like slavery, and sounds like slavery, but hey, they signed on a contract so that's why it is legal... oh, wait...

Employees agree to all kinds of policies that should be illegal, or which are illegal. Employers know that with the job market being what it is an employee will hand over their firstborn if that's what it takes to feed the rest of the family.

Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.

Well, I think the concern is more about stolen phones. However, the solution is still the same - provide the phone and you can wipe it anytime you feel like it. One of these days I'll put an app in the android market that claims to fully implement exchange security policies but which does not, sell it for $5, and make a fortune. If employers care that much about phone wiping then they should supply the phones so that they know they actually do get wiped.

Re:One More Reason...

[dargaud]

I mean, let's give it some perspective here. If there was a cleaning product called Nigger-n-Span I get the feeling there would be protests. We cannot have a truly colorblind society where everybody is equal if one group is defended more than another group.

There you go

WTF? Goatse sized security hole

[yes it is]

My university recently moved to Windows Live Mail student accounts. This comes up as an exchange server in the iPhone. Does this mean that a malicious attack could cause a mass remote wipe?

Google Sync/Gmail + ActiveSync = remote wipe?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if this can be done to any phone connected to an email/exchange server by ActiveSync protocol, presumably this means any of us that has set our phones to sync with Gmail using ActiveSync can be remote wiped at will by Google? That doesn't sound very comforting...

Re:One More Reason...

[tehcyder]

Well done for feeding the troll.

Re:One More Reason...

[tehcyder]

What would stop a company using free software and setting it up so it did exactly the same thing?

simple

[Tom]

Quite frankly: Do seperate private and work. It only brings you pain if you don't, and you deserve whatever you get.

Same goes for the other direction: If you store any personal data on your work PC (or other equipment), make sure that you have remote wipe capabilities, or it is encrypted.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

A company has plenty of reasons to remote wipe phones if they're accessing company communications. Also, i'm pretty sure you have to sign a contract/disclaimer telling you such, and if you haven't read it, then well, its your own fault.

Theres a feature in Android 2.2 that allows server side commands with email. I'm guessing its to do with exchange, but it warned me that it had the permissions to do a factory reset. If I wanted to access my email from out of the office but didn't need to, then i'd understand the risk involved. If they demanded (not offered) that I use my own phone to read company emails, and then wiped it, i'd be pissed, but then i would have found or demanded a phone to access it from!

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

You said "niggardly"! <sniggers>

Android

[Anonymous Coward]

So is "Mail" app on Android vulnerable to this?

Exactly what it says on the tin

[dbIII]

They call it Exchange because you'll be better off swapping it with something else.

Any mail transfer agent that had a policy of open relay by default after a patch, that used to need to be completely halted to do backups and needed a clone of the original machine just to read restored email backups should have been ditched for something decent a decade ago instead of building a huge monolith on top of failure.
It's the only MTA in production today that still loses email on occasion.

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[Rich0]

Or, you can just use the stock android email client (the open-source one), and just edit a few key calls to DevicePolicyManager. Viola, the phone looks like stock to the server, but it doesn't actually implement any security provisions that you don't want it to.

Re:One More Reason...

[.tekrox]

Does the name Nazir have anything to do with Nazi Germany?

Two more reasons ...

[RockDoctor]

... to use neither iAnything nor Exchange.

'Nuff said.

Re:Two more reasons ...

[jo_ham]

Of course, this is not unique to iPhone, or to Exchange. It applies to Android and Blackberry too - essentially anything that can use an Exchange server and hands over admin control. It also applies to Google's sync, since they use ActiveSync too, and can remote wipe a phone via admin control.

Don't let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good Apple and MS bash though.

Re:Two more reasons ...

[RockDoctor]

Well, since I don't use Apple stuff (tried a MacBook a few years ago ; wasn't impressed, except by the fact that I sold it for more than I paid for it), and I only use Exchange when it is what is provided by this week's client (MDaemon at work, with I'don't-know-what for mail access in the office), and I've not bothered to even try to set up email access to any phone that I've owned since 2000, I can see how utterly important it is is to the normal man in the street.

It's not incredible that there are good reasons for some companies to want to drive email down their worker's throats while the sit in a traffic jam somewhere. But then we're not talking about personal phones are we?

So Google's "ActiveSync" (whatever that is) has the potential to do the same. OK. That's a good reason not to install it on my phone. If it's available for Nokias. It might even be a reason to find out what, if anything, "ActiveSync" does. If a client, or my Boss wants to put it onto a phone of theirs and then hand me the phone (in return for a 24 hour a day invoice), that's their choice with their phone.

Re:Two more reasons ...

[jo_ham]

ActiveSync is the protocol, created by MS, that Exchange is based on, but that is used by a couple of other systems, most notably Google's sync. You don't install it, as such, in the same way you don't "install" http or ssh - either your client supports it or it doesn't.

If you have an Android phone, you already have the ability, I believe. I don't think you require a third party app. On iPhone, it is part of the core OS, but you don't have to use it, in the same way that you don;t have to with Google - they offer it as an option, but there's nothing stopping you using IMAP instead, which is how I sync with my gmail accounts.

Re:Two more reasons ...

[RockDoctor]

ActiveSync is the protocol, created by MS, that Exchange is based on, but that is used by a couple of other systems, most notably Google's sync.

Errr, I see. I think.

How on earth did Google get to use MS protocols? Or is this something that, inexplicably, MS have let the specifications out into public knowledge?

Ref IMAP etc. I think I understand the reasons, and I dumped the idea of trying to understand more fully years ago. Instead I'd just dump everything from my mailboxes onto the desktop machine with POP, then when I would go abroad, I'd copy the mail system and archive onto my laptop. I tried to get my head around synchronisation and shit like that, but gave it up as an incomprehensible waste of time. It's not as if you can ever successfully communicate between different client's accounts anyway, nor should you even attempt it (client confidentiality). If the Good Lord had intended us to develop complicated synchronisation protocols, he would never have invented the memory stick. Or indeed, the Zip drive. Or indeed, the concept of a compressed archive that you can span across multiple floppies (all of which I've used for synchronisation in the past.)

Re:One More Reason...

[AVee]

No, the real solution is to buy a phone without 'features' like that. Or at least one which will ask the actual owner of the device whether this feature should be enabled. I've been testing this, and while the HTC and iPhone of my colleges got wiped clean my N900 happily ignored the remote wipe. Accidentally the N900 also is a phone which you could actually use for a dual-boot scenario like that.

Re:One More Reason...

[GameboyRMH]

The only downside is that the N900 relies entirely on physical security to prevent unauthorized access to users with physical access, outside of its root partition. Turn it off and plug it in, and you have access to the 30GB internal storage and the MicroSD, and doing full-disk encryption of any kind on it is a gigantic PITA even by uber-geek standards, it requires heavy modification of the OS.

The N900 already locks out mass storage when locked, if only it didn't allow mass storage mode when powered off this would be mostly a non-issue. (microSD could be considered unsecure and isn't really necessary, beyond that you'd have to pull chips off the board).

But yeah I agree, don't buy a phone that "features" things like remote wiping out of the box. Remote wipe should be a secure operation that needs to be configured and controlled solely by the owner.

Cisco Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco Mobility Software has the ability to selectively delete data. Since most people now have their work and personal phones in one this allows you to wipe your corp. data and email but leave their family photos alone.

Re:One More Reason...

[Moryath]

There are professional race-baiters out there who see "racism" in the color of their morning coffee.

Most of them work for people like Al Sharpton, or racial supremacist organizations like the NAACP or LULAC.

Re:One More Reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cant stand the word RACIST. It should be removed from the dictionary. Its used so much, so over saturated, that its lost all of its true meaning. People who use the word racist, as in calling someone else a racist are pure jackasses these days. They have ZERO understanding of the meaning of the word. I hate spinach so therefore I must be racist against SOME farmer out there. Idiots.

Re:One More Reason...

[m.alessandrini]

for example, you would use a free version of the client too, so you could be aware of this "feature" and possibly remove it from the code.

Re: Going to post as top level comment... but...

[Paco103]

I've used Touchdown since the G1, prior to Android actually supporting exchange out of the box. I still prefer it over the built in client. The calendars are better, the address book is complete, the mail delivery is faster, and now just one more point to add in its favor.

"Your" iPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's all this about "your" iPhone? I thought we had already established that the device in your hands actually belongs to Steve Jobs and Apple.

This was the BIGGEST reason why I got

[Linnen]

a G-1 Google phone, that it did not integrate with office mail systems. Consumer Reposts had that as a minus, and for many smartphone users it could be. But why would I wish to tie my personal phone to the office's systems? Office issued cell-phones are called 'Ball-and-Chain' for a reason.

Also from Google Apps

[dmesg0]

Remote wipe can also be issued from Google apps, if the phone is configured to sync from it. Most see it as a very useful feature, the phone can be wiped if it is lost or stolen. Interestingly this feature isn't available in Google's own Android phones, it's necessary to use third party software for remote wiping.

Re:Personal is personal, and business is business.

[Rich0]

If you chose to mix them (for convenience) then understand the risk.

Nobody does anything work-related because it is "convenient." They do it to keep their jobs.

So, an employee has two choices - unpack and fire up a company laptop a few times every evening to stay on top of work email. Or, they can just use their smartphone. The company doesn't care which they do of course, but they do expect the employee to be as productive as all the other people who do these things.

So, the employee gets to choose between a few options, all of which are highly intrusive on their personal life. Then you criticize them for picking what for them is the lesser evil and then being upset when it bites them.

How about this - we pass a law that any data on my phone is my property without regard to any agreements I sign to the contrary. If the employer wants to let me use my phone to sync to their systems that is fine, but I get to keep anything I download when I quit. I suspect that most employers will suddenly be able to afford providing phones to those who need them, or telling employees not to stress out about working from home as much...

Could be worse...

[neminem]

In Soviet Russia, and by Soviet Russia I mean the fourth episode of Dollhouse, Echo's personal phone remote-wiped *her*.

This issue can be prevented

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable Outlook Mobile Access for anyone not issued a company smart phone unless they have signed the proper documents detailing the consequences.