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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."
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.
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
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?
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
... 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.
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.
... 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.
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...
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