15 ms·

This person chose to have their free phone from the company as their personal phone too. This is completely optional at Google, a really nice perk, and it's mad

This person chose to have their free phone from the company as their personal phone too. This is completely optional at Google, a really nice perk, and it's made very clear that anything under your work profile will be wiped if you leave. They will not wipe your personal phone or your personal profile on your phone. This is completely avoidable and shouldn't come as a surprise.

missosoup 7y ago
It's not a perk, it's a liability. This was an option at pretty much every company I worked at and I never understood what moron would choose to put their personal data/life on a corporate device (or connect their personal device to the corporate network and its management policy) with typical policies dictating that not only can the device be remotely wiped, it can also be remotely snooped. The only brief moment of this being acceptable was Samsung phones being able to have completely split personal/corporate profiles across 2 sims in a single phone and have 2 copies of each app, but that seems to have died. If your employer is managing the device you're choosing to also use for personal data, it's 100% your fault and 0% surprise when it backfires on you. If you work in tech and don't have a separate work phone+laptop and personal phone+laptop, you're either a founder or an idiot.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  It is a net perk because phone calling or mobile messaging is inevitably part of work and you don't want to buy your own separate phone. It's only awkward for anyone who isn't used to having two phones.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - LadyCailin 7y ago
    Calling and messaging are paid for by my company, and I can also sign in to my email. They have a program where I can get full access to all work resources, but it’s optional, and I will never sign up for that program, because exactly what’s being discussed here. But I still only have one phone, and they still pay for it, so.
    - thrwy20191203 7y ago
      Is the contract in your name and you pay the bill yourself and then expense it? Or is the contract in company's name they get full itemized bill from the carrier? If it is the latter, it sucks.
      - LadyCailin 7y ago
        They get the bill directly, but I'm not sure they can have access to the messaging or call data directly. I live in Europe, so I feel like the GDPR addresses this, but now that you mention it, I don't know this for sure.
- 0xEFF 7y ago
  Over half of Google's workforce are contractors. Google does not provide a mobile device to contractors. The options for TVC's are to let Google control a personal device or take a significant productivity hit and opt-out of mobile email, chat, and docs.
  - hvidgaard 7y ago
    Buy a "Google phone" and use it for that, keeping your private phone, well private. It's just the cost of doing business with them.
  - mekane8 7y ago
    That's a really crappy policy if I'm understanding it right - not provide a mobile device but insist on completely managing one if they choose to use it for company business? What a shitty way to treat people working for you.
    - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
      It should be illegal. How much is your employer allowed to know about you or who you contact outside of work? The answer should be nothing but there's a moral hazard wherein employees can't do much about it without limiting their career.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      How else could corporate IT possibly do it? A contractor can deduct work expenses from income, a phone is just one item on a long list of things that will be deducted. If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to remotely wipe that data.
      - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
        > If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to remotely wipe that data. I don't think, in a legal sense, that's true. It feels like it comes from the same mindset that corporations have a "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders to always put profits above all else; in fact, there's nothing in corporate law or financial regulations that requires that at all. The IT department has responsibility for network and systems policies and company-owned equipment, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to have the ability to wipe data on that equipment or set policies that disallow personal devices on company networks at all. But they have no requirement -- and I would argue no business -- to wipe a non-company device just because someone added a corporate email account to it. Does that make it marginally more likely that someone could keep corporate email that they weren't supposed to? Sure. But there are other legal ways of handling that which aren't destructive to non-company property. No one would argue that a policy of "if you take physical work home, upon termination the company can set fire to your house to ensure all copies are destroyed" is enforceable.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "...or connect their personal device to the corporate network and its management policy..." I've done this. You are absolutely right.
- endtime 7y ago
  Moron here. I work for Google and use my work phone as my personal phone, via Android work profile, so the work stuff is siloed. This means I have less than full access to company resources, but I don't really want to read code or respond to bugs on my phone anyway. My understanding is that Google can't see the personal stuff. But it doesn't matter that much to me, personally, if they can (I'm not doing any exciting corporate activism, anything illegal, etc.). At least, it doesn't matter more than a couple grand a year plus the inconvenience of two phones. I'm not saying everyone should feel this way, and obviously some people value privacy more than I do, but that's the trade-off that makes sense for this idiot.
  - bitcurious 7y ago
    I hope it also doesn’t matter to any of your friends. I would be pretty annoyed if I had a conversation with you and it ended up as property of google.
    - Hello71 7y ago
      if you're willing to assume that Google is willing to violate their presumably legally-enforceable policy that they will not view the items in the "personal profile", then one could assume that they would probably also be willing to read data from any Android device. so better tell all of your friends to never use Android or any other Google service.
      - freeone3000 7y ago
        Yes. This. Exactly.
      - gcbw3 7y ago
        You guys are insane. You signed something at work that "all data in google owned devices are property of google". Period. This is the same as using your company-provided computer for something else.
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    fwiw - Apple is also working on a similar setup to sandbox corporate apps from personal (with restrictions in between)
- tyingq 7y ago
  Android does support a work profile and "two copies of each app", with some limitations. https://developer.android.com/work/managed-profiles https://developer.android.com/work/managed-profiles
saiya-jin 7y ago
Then I wouldn't call it personal phone, strange description from OP/quote. That term indicates to me a phone I own completely, hardware, software and all data like photos. Same with laptops - if one decides to use work laptop for personal use its their choice at their own risk, but it doesn't become their personal laptop in any meaningful way. Even if hardware would stay after employment ends, every reasonable company would wipe it clean with some deep format & clean image of OS.
davidcbc 7y ago
It reads to me like she was using her personal phone to access corp, not a corp phone to access personal stuff. They absolutely will wipe your personal phone in that scenario
- avocado4 7y ago
  The device policy is simple. If you add a Corp account to any phone it's subject to device policy, including wipeout after you get fired. It's very obvious when you enroll.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    Not so simple, it depends how the MDM/EMM is set-up. If it's set up to entirely manage the device, then yes it will get fully wiped (we do this for corporate-owned device). A personal device can access our environment if requested (they have to sign an agreement form, explaining what we can or cannot do) and a work sandbox will be created, in which only the apps installed in this sandbox will have access to corporate data (ex: you'll have a copy of Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, etc in the sandbox). In the situation of a personal device, a wipe will only remove that sandbox, leaving the personal data untouched.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  This happened to me before too, but the phone was wiped by accident by IT. Never again will I trust any corp junk on a personal device.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  If the user had the phone configured as a corp phone and was taking photos and did not have Cloud backup enabled to automatically shunt those photos to their personal account, then when the phone is forcefully de-corped, it will try to purge local photo cache (because there's no way to know if photos in local cache were corp-sensitive or not, so the conservative solution is "Burn it all down"). Of course, if the user does have their Cloud backup enabled to automatically shunt photos, they're at risk of using the phone in a work environment and accidentally storing proprietary info in their personal account. The fact the camera UI doesn't really allow you to choose what account you're snapping photos under makes the whole arrangement lose-lose, and this is a really easy failure mode for a user to find themselves in if they don't see it coming.
javajosh 7y ago
This person chose... Did they really choose? Do you think they said to themselves, "Gosh, I love living dangerously and the way I'm going to get my thrill-seeking on this time is to keep my personal photos where they'll be auto-erased if I'm fired, woohoo!" Obviously, no, they didn't say that, think that, or do that, and your comment is (and go ahead HN and downvote me for this), pure fucking evil because it blames the victim here. It is evil to expect people to dwell in the fine print of their relationships when that fine print is used to hurt them. Human beings can and should expect dignity, respect, and compassion from people, and when they are abused they deserve support, encouragement, and justice, not a goddamned dog-pile. You people blame ER patients who get stuck with $100k+ bills even though they have insurance because, hey, they didn't read the fine print and didn't refuse care from out-of-network providers. You're like the bank that, in 2002 when my father was dying, charged me a $35 overdraft fee to cover a $1 overage when I was broke and trying to get him something from the store, instead of just refusing the charge. You know what they said? I should check my balance before every purchase and refused to turn off "overdraft protection". I hope you get a big, big dose of your own medicine.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Who doesn’t know that using a company device for personal use is a bad idea? We aren’t talking about a Luddite here.
- notyourwork 7y ago
  It’s made very clear when you enroll in MDM what the implications are. If we can’t trust tech people to own decisions like this than how do we expect tech illiterate to understand. These are software engineers at Google, not someone’s grandma who did what the cell phone guy at the mall said to do. Come on.
- el_s3v3n 7y ago
  Yes, they did choose. It's a very voluntary and conscious decision to say "I am going to use my corporate device for personal needs, too." Google provides a number of things. Food, showers, vehicles, lockers. You may CHOOSE to use these things or you may CHOOSE not to. If you CHOOSE to store all your personal docs on your work laptop, and the laptop goes up in flames, who do you blame then? Victim shaming is one thing, but being a naive child is another. A wise, rational, level-headed adult understands that company-owned assets are not suitable for personal use. Period.
michaelt 7y ago
So if you take a photo with the default camera app, is that put into the area that gets wiped, or the area that doesn't? If photos would be put in the area that doesn't get wiped, any idea what the quote is about?
- lnanek2 7y ago
  She likely wasn't using separate work and personal profiles. That's a fairly new innovation. I've been using Android since the first public device was sold and only started doing it with the Samsung S10 5G. Most people just accept company MDM on their personal profiles and install everything in the same place.
- gregd 7y ago
  This isn't that hard to understand. In order to access corporate email systems, you have two choices generally. Either you use a Corporate Owned device or you use a Personal Device but allow Corporate to do what they want to it. In either situation, the corp has the ability to remotely wipe the device and enforce other policies on said device. This should be abundantly clear to anyone who works in Tech.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    And to anyone who believes that corporations have a responsibility to protect the data they collect (and should be held civilly, if not even criminally liable for breaches), anything less than having complete control over devices holding corporate data is corporate malfeasance.
papito 7y ago
A girl I used to date had a company phone. She was getting these racy random messages that, what appeared to be, were lewd conversations between two other employees, or two random someones, presumably on the same system. I found that hilarious.

missosoup 7y ago

It's not a perk, it's a liability. This was an option at pretty much every company I worked at and I never understood what moron would choose to put their personal data/life on a corporate device (or connect their personal device to the corporate network and its management policy) with typical policies dictating that not only can the device be remotely wiped, it can also be remotely snooped. The only brief moment of this being acceptable was Samsung phones being able to have completely split personal/corporate profiles across 2 sims in a single phone and have 2 copies of each app, but that seems to have died. If your employer is managing the device you're choosing to also use for personal data, it's 100% your fault and 0% surprise when it backfires on you. If you work in tech and don't have a separate work phone+laptop and personal phone+laptop, you're either a founder or an idiot.

threatofrain 7y ago
It is a net perk because phone calling or mobile messaging is inevitably part of work and you don't want to buy your own separate phone. It's only awkward for anyone who isn't used to having two phones.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- LadyCailin 7y ago
  Calling and messaging are paid for by my company, and I can also sign in to my email. They have a program where I can get full access to all work resources, but it’s optional, and I will never sign up for that program, because exactly what’s being discussed here. But I still only have one phone, and they still pay for it, so.
  - thrwy20191203 7y ago
    Is the contract in your name and you pay the bill yourself and then expense it? Or is the contract in company's name they get full itemized bill from the carrier? If it is the latter, it sucks.
    - LadyCailin 7y ago
      They get the bill directly, but I'm not sure they can have access to the messaging or call data directly. I live in Europe, so I feel like the GDPR addresses this, but now that you mention it, I don't know this for sure.
0xEFF 7y ago
Over half of Google's workforce are contractors. Google does not provide a mobile device to contractors. The options for TVC's are to let Google control a personal device or take a significant productivity hit and opt-out of mobile email, chat, and docs.
- hvidgaard 7y ago
  Buy a "Google phone" and use it for that, keeping your private phone, well private. It's just the cost of doing business with them.
- mekane8 7y ago
  That's a really crappy policy if I'm understanding it right - not provide a mobile device but insist on completely managing one if they choose to use it for company business? What a shitty way to treat people working for you.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    It should be illegal. How much is your employer allowed to know about you or who you contact outside of work? The answer should be nothing but there's a moral hazard wherein employees can't do much about it without limiting their career.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    How else could corporate IT possibly do it? A contractor can deduct work expenses from income, a phone is just one item on a long list of things that will be deducted. If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to remotely wipe that data.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      > If there is corporate information on a device, it would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility not to manage that device and have the ability to remotely wipe that data. I don't think, in a legal sense, that's true. It feels like it comes from the same mindset that corporations have a "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders to always put profits above all else; in fact, there's nothing in corporate law or financial regulations that requires that at all. The IT department has responsibility for network and systems policies and company-owned equipment, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to have the ability to wipe data on that equipment or set policies that disallow personal devices on company networks at all. But they have no requirement -- and I would argue no business -- to wipe a non-company device just because someone added a corporate email account to it. Does that make it marginally more likely that someone could keep corporate email that they weren't supposed to? Sure. But there are other legal ways of handling that which aren't destructive to non-company property. No one would argue that a policy of "if you take physical work home, upon termination the company can set fire to your house to ensure all copies are destroyed" is enforceable.
mcguire 7y ago
"...or connect their personal device to the corporate network and its management policy..." I've done this. You are absolutely right.
endtime 7y ago
Moron here. I work for Google and use my work phone as my personal phone, via Android work profile, so the work stuff is siloed. This means I have less than full access to company resources, but I don't really want to read code or respond to bugs on my phone anyway. My understanding is that Google can't see the personal stuff. But it doesn't matter that much to me, personally, if they can (I'm not doing any exciting corporate activism, anything illegal, etc.). At least, it doesn't matter more than a couple grand a year plus the inconvenience of two phones. I'm not saying everyone should feel this way, and obviously some people value privacy more than I do, but that's the trade-off that makes sense for this idiot.
- bitcurious 7y ago
  I hope it also doesn’t matter to any of your friends. I would be pretty annoyed if I had a conversation with you and it ended up as property of google.
  - Hello71 7y ago
    if you're willing to assume that Google is willing to violate their presumably legally-enforceable policy that they will not view the items in the "personal profile", then one could assume that they would probably also be willing to read data from any Android device. so better tell all of your friends to never use Android or any other Google service.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Yes. This. Exactly.
    - gcbw3 7y ago
      You guys are insane. You signed something at work that "all data in google owned devices are property of google". Period. This is the same as using your company-provided computer for something else.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  fwiw - Apple is also working on a similar setup to sandbox corporate apps from personal (with restrictions in between)
tyingq 7y ago
Android does support a work profile and "two copies of each app", with some limitations. https://developer.android.com/work/managed-profiles https://developer.android.com/work/managed-profiles

saiya-jin 7y ago

Then I wouldn't call it personal phone, strange description from OP/quote. That term indicates to me a phone I own completely, hardware, software and all data like photos. Same with laptops - if one decides to use work laptop for personal use its their choice at their own risk, but it doesn't become their personal laptop in any meaningful way. Even if hardware would stay after employment ends, every reasonable company would wipe it clean with some deep format & clean image of OS.

davidcbc 7y ago

It reads to me like she was using her personal phone to access corp, not a corp phone to access personal stuff. They absolutely will wipe your personal phone in that scenario

avocado4 7y ago
The device policy is simple. If you add a Corp account to any phone it's subject to device policy, including wipeout after you get fired. It's very obvious when you enroll.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Not so simple, it depends how the MDM/EMM is set-up. If it's set up to entirely manage the device, then yes it will get fully wiped (we do this for corporate-owned device). A personal device can access our environment if requested (they have to sign an agreement form, explaining what we can or cannot do) and a work sandbox will be created, in which only the apps installed in this sandbox will have access to corporate data (ex: you'll have a copy of Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, etc in the sandbox). In the situation of a personal device, a wipe will only remove that sandbox, leaving the personal data untouched.
dawnerd 7y ago
This happened to me before too, but the phone was wiped by accident by IT. Never again will I trust any corp junk on a personal device.
shadowgovt 7y ago
If the user had the phone configured as a corp phone and was taking photos and did not have Cloud backup enabled to automatically shunt those photos to their personal account, then when the phone is forcefully de-corped, it will try to purge local photo cache (because there's no way to know if photos in local cache were corp-sensitive or not, so the conservative solution is "Burn it all down"). Of course, if the user does have their Cloud backup enabled to automatically shunt photos, they're at risk of using the phone in a work environment and accidentally storing proprietary info in their personal account. The fact the camera UI doesn't really allow you to choose what account you're snapping photos under makes the whole arrangement lose-lose, and this is a really easy failure mode for a user to find themselves in if they don't see it coming.

javajosh 7y ago

This person chose... Did they really choose? Do you think they said to themselves, "Gosh, I love living dangerously and the way I'm going to get my thrill-seeking on this time is to keep my personal photos where they'll be auto-erased if I'm fired, woohoo!" Obviously, no, they didn't say that, think that, or do that, and your comment is (and go ahead HN and downvote me for this), pure fucking evil because it blames the victim here. It is evil to expect people to dwell in the fine print of their relationships when that fine print is used to hurt them. Human beings can and should expect dignity, respect, and compassion from people, and when they are abused they deserve support, encouragement, and justice, not a goddamned dog-pile. You people blame ER patients who get stuck with $100k+ bills even though they have insurance because, hey, they didn't read the fine print and didn't refuse care from out-of-network providers. You're like the bank that, in 2002 when my father was dying, charged me a $35 overdraft fee to cover a $1 overage when I was broke and trying to get him something from the store, instead of just refusing the charge. You know what they said? I should check my balance before every purchase and refused to turn off "overdraft protection". I hope you get a big, big dose of your own medicine.

scarface74 7y ago
Who doesn’t know that using a company device for personal use is a bad idea? We aren’t talking about a Luddite here.
notyourwork 7y ago
It’s made very clear when you enroll in MDM what the implications are. If we can’t trust tech people to own decisions like this than how do we expect tech illiterate to understand. These are software engineers at Google, not someone’s grandma who did what the cell phone guy at the mall said to do. Come on.
el_s3v3n 7y ago
Yes, they did choose. It's a very voluntary and conscious decision to say "I am going to use my corporate device for personal needs, too." Google provides a number of things. Food, showers, vehicles, lockers. You may CHOOSE to use these things or you may CHOOSE not to. If you CHOOSE to store all your personal docs on your work laptop, and the laptop goes up in flames, who do you blame then? Victim shaming is one thing, but being a naive child is another. A wise, rational, level-headed adult understands that company-owned assets are not suitable for personal use. Period.

michaelt 7y ago

So if you take a photo with the default camera app, is that put into the area that gets wiped, or the area that doesn't? If photos would be put in the area that doesn't get wiped, any idea what the quote is about?

lnanek2 7y ago
She likely wasn't using separate work and personal profiles. That's a fairly new innovation. I've been using Android since the first public device was sold and only started doing it with the Samsung S10 5G. Most people just accept company MDM on their personal profiles and install everything in the same place.
gregd 7y ago
This isn't that hard to understand. In order to access corporate email systems, you have two choices generally. Either you use a Corporate Owned device or you use a Personal Device but allow Corporate to do what they want to it. In either situation, the corp has the ability to remotely wipe the device and enforce other policies on said device. This should be abundantly clear to anyone who works in Tech.
- zaroth 7y ago
  And to anyone who believes that corporations have a responsibility to protect the data they collect (and should be held civilly, if not even criminally liable for breaches), anything less than having complete control over devices holding corporate data is corporate malfeasance.

papito 7y ago

A girl I used to date had a company phone. She was getting these racy random messages that, what appeared to be, were lewd conversations between two other employees, or two random someones, presumably on the same system. I found that hilarious.