Using personal phone to check work email

Gmcsierra

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missouri
If you use your personal smart phone to check work email does that give your employer access to your phone? And if so how? I keep reading articles about employers monitoring employees phones.
 
Monitor? Typically not as just connecting your email client to their servers doesn't give them the tools to monitor what your phone does 24/7. That said, anyting you do while connected to their wifi is moniter-able, and if they give you a company-owned phone they can have things installed to monitor that as well.

The worst they can do with your personal phone (that you typically have to agree to depending on email server and app) is wipe it back to factory if you lose the phone or you get fired.
 
I wouldn't personally want to use my personal phone to check work emails. It's like celegorm said, their servers can impose policies on your phone which are undesirable to you... potentially they could remotely wipe all the data on your phone!
 
It will depend. I use my personal phone to access my company email, but we have Outlook Web App access since we techs were issued netbooks for doing our paperwork and email and such (never use mine, just do it on my phone). I am only connected through a web page so they have no access to my device.

My work phone, however, is completely accessible to work as it uses an email client and work has installed software that allows them to control the device if they so want. It is an iPhone so they are completely welcome to it (Android guy at heart).
 
Employers that I have worked for have insisted that any phone you use for conducting their business have certain monitoring/security enforcement software installed on it and have you agree that they can have access to your phone.

For the reasons above, I would never use my personal phone for conducting company business. I started a new job just this week and the company provided me with a phone which I was required to install the software Airwatch which, among other things, enforces certain security rules on the phone. I'll only use this phone for business but will use my personal phone for my personal business.
 
It isn't a company phone it was just my personal phone. And I connected to the gmail work account through a webpage also. But I was asking if a new machine connected to their email system through webpage or however if that gave them some kind of access.
 
If you are just accessing your email through a browser, you probably have nothing to worry about. If you are adding your work email though an email client, corporate security settings might get pushed to your phone but you would typically be notified while setting up.

My corporate iPhone forces me to use stronger passwords and change passwords more often than the default iPhone settings require. These security rules were pushed from a corporate server when I setup my work email in the built in iPhone email client.
 
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