Wipeout: When Your Company Kills Your iPhone
23rd November 2010
Turns out, there’s an app for that.
Everything was gone — all her contacts, photos and even the phone’s ability to make calls.
It was only after she got home to Silicon Valley that she found out that her phone had been killed by her employer, a publishing company.
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. The wipe was done by mistake, and Stanton wouldn’t have been surprised to see this kind of remote control on a company phone.
But this iPhone was hers.
“It was my account, in my name [and] I’d paid all the bills,” Stanton says. “It didn’t make any sense to me that somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone, and could completely disable the phone and the account.”
The phone doesn’t need to download any new software. All that’s necessary is for the phone’s user to configure it to receive e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange Server — the kind most big companies use.
Once that’s been set up, an IT department has the capability to wipe the phone and turn off functions like Bluetooth, the Web browser and even the phone’s camera.
November 24th, 2010 at 15:08
A fine reason not to allow your employer access to your smartphone.