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iOS 9.3 Will Tell You If Your Employer Is Monitoring Your iPhone (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nobody likes being monitored. But even if you suspected your company is following your activities on the iPhone, would you know where to check? In the next iteration of its smartphone operating system, iOS 9.3, Apple is looking to make this an easier task. According to Reddit user MaGNeTiX, the latest beta of iOS 9.3 has a message telling users their iPhone is being supervised. The message is as prominent as can be, both on the device's lock screen and in the About section. "This iPhone is managed by your organization," the message on the lock screen says. And in the About screen, you get a little more detail, with a message saying your iPhone's supervisor can monitor your Internet traffic and locate your device.
My employer already has a notice on the lock screen about monitoring, but even if they didn't, anyone who has a device managed by their employer should assume it is being monitored unless proven otherwise.
Why would someone let your employer monitor YOUR iphone? I could see if they supplied it but not if it is mine.
But even if you suspected your company is following your activities on the iPhone, would you know where to check?
I'd probably check my terms of employment and whether or not my company had issued me an iPhone.
If they did, I would assume yes, and they would be in the right of it to monitor/manage said company-issued hardware.
I mean, I like it when information is clearly communicated, but isn't it kind of a no-brainer that when your employer provides you with a phone that they are going to monitor its usage? Even if they don't, it should be the default assumption of the user that they do. Same thing with any desktop/laptop and internet connection they provide.
All this does is point out the obvious.
Now, if they had a message that told me my Service Provider was in some way monitoring my privately purchased/owned personal phone, that would be fantastic!
can they get in to your phone with out your pin?
Sure it's obvious to technical people like us that a company issued phone is going to be monitored and administered remotely.
But how many non-technical people would know enough to assume that? It's for those people the prominent message can help them think twice before doing something with the company device they may regret later,
If you think about it, it's even helpful for technical people - because as you say, a technical user would assume a company phone would be monitored and controlled. So if you do NOT see this message on a company device you can ask your IT staff why the hell they are not using MDM to control the devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No. This is for employer provided/managed phones.
But some people here assume everyone knows how computers, devices and the like work.
so with an employer provided/managed phones you set you own pin switch to a new job and they are now SOL to get any info off of it.
There are employers who insist that they be allowed to install this evil crap on the devices owned by the users. Apple is making a huge mistake allowing this.
This sort of crap is what helped bring down Blackberry. Pretty much anything that is good for a corporation is not good for the users.
This is one of those insidious things where they give a little for a bunch of corporate sales, then they give some more and more and more until they are kowtowing to the enterprise market and they are making Microsoft crap.
The iPhone is a very good phone. Keep it pristine, they kept the Telcos from installing bloatware and this is a huge part of the iPhone success. Corporations will be still forced to provide iPhones even if they don't allow paranoid IT people to turn them into shit.
Yes, your employer can get into your issued phone if they set it up correctly.
This is one reason why the current well publicized FBI/Apple court order debate is stupid- if the government hadn't screwed up, they wouldn't need Apple's help to get into the phone they had issued. Given that the government screws up something simple like this, why should we believe they won't screw up at safeguarding the special software they want.
Include an alert if your phone has negotiated an unencrypted connection with the nearest "cell tower" (aka Stingray). Like my Motorola Razr v3 does.
Have gnu, will travel.
It should be noted that it isn't just employers that enable these features. As reported on slashdot, Sprint has been using this too. What made the Sprint situation even more troubling was that it went against their own stated policy and it was hard for the customer to know that it had been activated without knowing exactly what to look for. As far as I know, Sprint still has not provided the full details on how they either use or abused these MDM activation. Instead, they have replaced transparency with stating that customers are free to factory reset their phones if they don't like Sprint underhanded actions.
Instead of advising us our phones are monitored, which we already know, the device informs us when anyone actively uses these functions, especially remote access to the cam/mic. Locate notification should be an option but in practice many organizations would simply have automatic logging of this data and it would trigger every few minutes.
File under No F*cking Sh*t. If there's a OS tie in to a management system or other mobile device manager, OF COURSE they can see it.
What it's not going to be able to tell you is if I have all ingress/egress Internet traffic and even inter-VLAN traffic tapped over to an IDS/IPS system that's silently observing or is in transparent mode inline. You don't have a way of knowing that's there if I'm not mangling payloads -- that's kinda the point.
This is just a BS ploy to make users feel better about thinking they know something.
No. https://www.apple.com/business...
....does it tell you if the FBI is monitoring your phone?
I worked at a company where the management team got very insecure about their positions and thought that the regular employees were out to get them. So they got a program to remotely monitor desktops. One morning my manager came running over to my cubicle to inform me that I wasn't allowed to look at Amazon on company time. And then he discovered that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand, which meant I was on my break and I'm allowed to look at the Internet on my break time. So I told him to bugger off. Since the company next door had an open wireless access point, many of my coworkers used their PDA's to browse the internet to avoid using their PCs.
They can get into *their* phone, which they are letting you use, without your pin if they are doing it right.
They can't get into *your* phone, which you bought yourself and manage yourself, without your pin.
IOW - If your employer provides you with a phone, it's not really yours.
Geez, the phone was not issued or owned by the FBI, it was owned by a county. The FBI and a county are in no way related, except that they both are part of governments (though not the same government). Why do you try to equate them?
Why would someone let your employer monitor YOUR iphone?
The employer may require it as a condition of letting you attach your device to their network. You don't have to let them monitor your phone but they don't have to let you access their network with it either.
>> iOS 9.3 Will Tell You If Your Employer Is Monitoring Your IPhone
How to know the US government is spying on you ?
Get employed by the US government...
aaaaaaa
If you get something from your employer, they get to monitor it. If it's something you yourself provided, then you call the shots. What's so technical about it?
There is a third option. You provide the device but want to access the employer's network with it. No sane employer would permit you to attach a device they didn't buy, approve or at least have the ability to monitor. You don't have to provide them access to the device but then you can't attach your device to their network either.
Geez, the phone was not issued or owned by the FBI, it was owned by a county.
The FBI ordered the county technician to change the iCloud account password, doing the exact opposite of what Apple told them to do. In short, FBI stands for Fumbling Bumbling Idiots.
>> iOS 9.3 Will Tell You If Your Employer Is Monitoring Your IPhone
How to know the US government is spying on you ? Get employed anywhere in the world...
An employer can't do a damn thing if you don't connect to their network and don't use the device on their property or their time.
Will it also notify me if Apple is monitoring, Amazon, Google, or basically any cloud service out there?
This sort of crap is what helped bring down Blackberry.
Bzzzt, wrong. So very, very wrong. The Blackberry 10 series were specifically designed to have 2 secure and independent partitions - a personal partition and a work partition. When you would associate your device with your work account, the corporate admin would only have control over the work partition and your personal partition would be out of reach. Blackberry got 99 problems, but offering a secure device that protects a user's personal information from corporate overreach is definitely NOT one!
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
How about a big message saying this device is being monitored by the NSA, CIA, and FBI thanks to the likes like Senator Feinstein.
Two easy answers that come to mind:
1) "Oh, I don't have a smartphone. Can you issue one"?
2) Go out and buy a cheap-assed-but-usable Huawei for $100, put it on Net10/MetroPCS/whatever, and use it only for corporate stuff. Write off the costs on your taxes.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Oh Stan you silly man.
Read the screen grabs, http://imgur.com/a/Eb4yJ
[ This iPhone is managed by your organisation. ]
What sort of idiot would not already know this about a work phone? It is same for a work PC, and work land line, or even a room at work. Oh yeah Apple users...
My company is too cheap, we have to use our personal phones.
They should add it to the damn icloud activation lock status page.
https://www.icloud.com/activat...
What good does that page do if it won't tell you it has a factory set MDM profile that can't be removed even if its not activation locked?
Come on apple what the fuck were you thinking?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
They can get into *their* toilet, which they are letting you use, without your any bolt-locks if they are doing it right. IOW - If your employer provides you with a bathroom break, it's not really yours.
FTFY
Nope. Corp contracts have a backdoor PIN and the handset is usually SIM locked so you can't simply replace the SIM in a nine hundred Dollar company phone.
(been there with Vodafone).
Basically, if an employee leaves, you can brick the phone by calling the service centre with your company credentials and asking them to deactivate it. Then it's a simple case of calling the employee on an alternative line or even writing them and asking for the handset to be returned - then it's just a case of sending it back to be RMAd and returned factory fresh with a new SIM. Otherwise what they have is a worthless paperweight (since it would be covered under the group insurance policy anyway). Apart from that, remember calling digital voicemail on a landline? Same thing with a Voda corp contract: call the voicemail access for that handset and input the PIN, it gives you the call history for the last five calls (or however many you've set it to). There's all sorts of other stuff you can do.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
This is one reason why the current well publicized FBI/Apple court order debate is stupid- if the government hadn't screwed up, they wouldn't need Apple's help to get into the phone they had issued. Given that the government screws up something simple like this, why should we believe they won't screw up at safeguarding the special software they want.
If anyone had told them that the guy was going to kill 14 people, sure, they would have done that. But nobody told them. But if you think about it, IF they had the means of unlocking the phone at any time, then surely nobody would be stupid enough to leave incriminating information on their works phone.
And remember, this is one of three phones that the killer had been using, and two phones he smashed up completely before he got killed. So you can guess which phone did _not_ contain anything juicy.
The only effect in the fight of terrorism of enforcing MDM on all employees phones would be that terrorist cannot use a company phone for plotting terrorist acts but that they would be forced to buy their own phones out of their own pocket.
nope. What killed Blackberry was their proprietery messaging system (which nobody else could access) and the fact that Apple had released the iPhone right around the same time RIM bombed, because the iPhone was everything the Blackberry wasn't: useful.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Please shut up Hillary, nobody believes you.
"This iPhone is monitored by your friendly NSA, FBI and CIA,"
The iPhone was many things, but useful it was, most assuredly, not. The lack of basic features like task switching and copy/paste put it well behind the competition on that front. It's why BBs outsold iPhone and Android handsets for years after you inexplicably believe they "bombed".
They're still leagues ahead of iOS and Android when it comes to management, privacy, security, and usability.
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If I were concerned about this, I'd simply get a Blackberry for it's Work/Play mode or Samsung's Knox. Both isolate sections of the phone, and an MDM request to factory reset only affects work ams leaves my data perfectly untouched.
Be heard.
Bring about change.
Strengthen the fight of privacy.
A smartphone is a handheld computer. I think even nontechnical people get that.
my pc says they can and will be able to see how i use my pc at their discretion but there is no such message on the phone, i assume it should be possible to login to verizon and pull phone and sms metadata as a normal user would for any personal phone but cant recall being able to pull sms and voicemail content when i wasnt using google voice.
BB didn't have copy/paste until the release of the 8000 series (2007/8) which had the requisite multitouch screens that the previous models lacked. Apple had it in the iPhone by March 2009 (announced for iOS 3). The iPhone 1 had a touchscreen in mid 2007. Six million units sold in thirteen months, which counted for nearly HALF the global smartphone market at the time, with Blackberry having taken SIX YEARS to sell the same number of units.
Raw comparison: Blackberry's flagship phone for 2008, the Bold 9000 based on a 624 MHZ Marvell PXA930, had GPS and a microSD slot and DIDN'T have multitouch (hence cut/paste) capability - it was in fact pretty fuckin' dumb for a "smart"phone. The iPhone 3G had: 412 MHz ARM1176JZF-S processor, but it also came with accelerometer, aGPS, multi-touch, proximity and ambient light sensors, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU, shipped with support for Microsoft Exchange (which Blackberry didn't), and soft upgrade option to iOS 3 or 4 for cut/paste (4 also got task switching and foreground priority, which Blackberry didn't get until the release of the 9000 series Storm at the start of 2009).
Winner: Apple. By a country mile. Unless all you wanted was something you could send text messages on.
Apple could have gone with something akin to the Nokia N-Gage, but it would have bombed just like the Nokia did. I mean, three million in four years, is not good even for a unit that tries to do everything and sucks at all of them.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I"m surprised you don't have a standard form that explains that the employee has the right to opt out of the company's intrusive tracking of the use of a personal phone. And, the employee guarantees than no one under 13 years of age will be allowed to use the phone.
that I'm experiencing real cognitive dissonance right now. I've never liked their walled garden, and they were leaders in the 'you don't really own your hardware, we do' trend. But just recently they told the FBI to get stuffed, and now they're baking into their phones a warning when the user is being monitored. Apple as a 'good guy'? The sky is falling!
Part of me wonders if they're simply ahead of the curve, seeing a business opportunity in a populace fast becoming sick of having their privacy butt-raped over and over. Even if it is simply a case of anticipating and meeting market demand, here they are doing the right thing. So I have to say, (grudgingly), kudos to Apple for taking a stand against institutionalized invasion of privacy. Colour me conflicted...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Make iphone cases with "does my employer monitor this phone: YES" written on it. No need for a software solution.
Oh how i laugh at you. Corporation managed phones. That shit don't fly here.
Now am i supposed to thank apple for this great innovation? Why are they allowing this corporate management bullshit anyway?
BB didn't have copy/paste until the release of the 8000 series
Nonsense. It worked fine on my 7290 (c. 2005), and the 6210 (c. 2003).
which had the requisite multitouch screens that the previous models lacked.
None of the 8000 series models had any sort of touch screen. The first would have been the 9500 series (c. 2008)
The iPhone 1 had a touchscreen in mid 2007. Six million units sold in thirteen months, which counted for nearly HALF the global smartphone market at the time
In 4Q 2007, Apple had captured a whopping 7% of the global smartphone market, and a healthy 25% of the U.S. market (well below RIM's 35%). Though by 1Q 2008, Apple had declined to 19%, while RIM had recaptured nearly 9%, holding 44% of the U.S. market. Analysts at the time attributed Apple's loss to RIM's gain. Looking at more recent figures, globally, Apple's share has declined from around 17% to 14% from 2Q 2012 to 2Q 2015. At no time has Apple held anything close to 50% of the market either in the U.S. or globally.
It doesn't look like you're going to say anything remotely true, so let's skip ahead to the weirdest part:
and DIDN'T have multitouch (hence cut/paste) capability
That is, your inexplicable belief that multi-touch is somehow a necessary prerequisite to copy/paste. My Palm Pilot didn't have multi-touch, yet had copy/paste. So has every smartphone and PDA I've ever owned (touch screen, multi-touch, and otherwise). So has every computer I've owned that had that as a feature of the OS. Further back, that feature was present in just about every word processor, no mouse or light-pen required.
Winner: Apple. By a country mile.
So it's was the productivity winner in your mind even though it was decidedly less useful than the competition, lacking basic features like copy/paste, task switching, and countless others the competing devices had years before?
See, that was the entire point. Whatever the iPhone was, and it was many things, it certainly wasn't a step forward in productivity. I mentioned two features (only one of which seemed to interest you at all) though there were many basic features it lacked. It was phenomenally successful (though dramatically less so that you seem to believe), but it was not successful because it made its users more productive.
Required reading for internet skeptics
What if my employee ended up being a terrorist? What if knowing they were planning to blow up my factory? Wouldn't a heads-up be worth it? No one cares you google " shemales". Seriously. I won't fire you for speeding 150mph in a school zone. Not my place. But seriously Apple, cut the privacy cult out of the world. Oh and the only two times my identity were stolen was because I bought some stuff from a sketchy website. Twice. Not because someone hacked my phone.
Plus if the employee had provided work phones, wouldn't those want to be monitored? What if and why not.
so you move the fucking goalposts. ::golf clap:: Well done.
This thread is done.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Did I? My only claims were that the iPhone was not as useful as its competitors, as evidenced by its lack of basic features, and that it did not outsell BB during the period you claimed. Both of these claims are true. You countered with obviously incorrect and irrelevant nonsense, which I corrected.
Sorry to hurt your feelings, but reality is reality.
Required reading for internet skeptics