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by endtime 2395 days 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.

3 comments

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.
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.
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.

Yes. This. Exactly.
fwiw - Apple is also working on a similar setup to sandbox corporate apps from personal (with restrictions in between)
> Android work profile, so the work stuff is siloed.

> My understanding is that Google can't see the personal stuff.

You are completely wrong.

First they have access to all your text and calls, since they own the mobile plan you are connecting trhu.

Second, the "device administrator", keyword: device, can wipe out the entire device, not just one account.

> But it doesn't matter that much to me, personally

So why comment on a thread where this is the topic?

Because the commenter I responded to said he couldn't understand why anyone would do what I do. There's an implicit question there that I was attempting to answer.

Good point about also owning the phone plan. But since I use Google Voice for everything (personal account) I'm not sure how much of that they can see (in their capacity as owners of my phone service), and like I said, I'm not doing anything interesting. If Google really wants to see my call logs of wife, wife, friend, mother in law, wife, wife, wife, dad, friend, etc. it's not worth thousands of dollars a year and an extra phone in my pocket to prevent it.

so, you have nothing to hide. cool. Just remember to not use your google voice or google meet for those union talks ;)
If I were involved in such things, of course I wouldn't use a corp device.