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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Can you support your claims? I’ve worked with Intune, Jamf, MaaS360, Citrix, and Workspace ONE and none of them could read texts, emails or browser history.
I’d be very interested to learn more about how they can access this information through MDM. We always did it through either the mobile carrier or the admin console for whatever the office/mail suite that was deployed.
SMS reading:
https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KB-000034436?language=en_US
Call log reading:
https://knowledgebase.42gears.com/article/how-to-view-call-logs-on-android-phones-remotely-using-suremdm/
app lists:
https://help.ivanti.com/mi/help/en_us/cld/admin/ivanti/91/all/en-us/App_Inventory.htm
I looked through your links. I don’t see anywhere that SMS can be read. The permission kind of makes sense as there is a security component to filter spam/phishing type texts. Sophos themselves claim they don’t store any of that data.
I hadn’t ever seen the call log one and I’m not sure what that would even be used for. It was interesting though.
App lists is common across all MDMs. It’s used to ensure apps are being updated and on fully owned corporate devices some apps will be blocked.
It seems like many don’t really understand how this technology works. That said, it’s better to be overly careful and I agree with others in the comments. If you want me to use a mobile device for work you can provide it, I don’t put MDM on my personal device*.
*the exception being our own MDM we have setup to manage our personal devices more easily.
From the link, emphasis mine. SMC is the MDM in question
2. Read all SMS for Backup.
Yep, it’s part of their message filtering that I mentioned.
This link provides more information and explicitly states the following:
and
Sophos has a strong cybersecurity focus which, I’d imagine, is why they have the message filtering option that they do.
...why would they need to backup all SMS messages for a filtering option? That just plain does not compute.
The short answer is to restore it:
I’m not a Sophos admin, never have been, so I can only speculate but it might be to restore a message that was altered due to the filtering if captured incorrectly.
I’m also not sure why it specifies SMS but not RCS. I do know Sophos uses SMS to communicate between a device and Sophos Central.
Without more context and information it’s hard to say what exactly happening from the permissions KB.
I can’t definitively say it’s not possible but I’ve never heard of an MDM that allows an admin to read user texts. I appreciate the links, it helps to understand where you’re coming from.
I still remain skeptical but, like I said, better to be over cautious than under. I’d be leery of any company that tried requiring me to use my personal device with MDM.
Everywhere I’ve worked with BYOD it’s been optional to use your personal device. If you were in a role that required it you’d get a company provided device.