So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose “any authenticator” and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it’s demonstrably safer? Or is this a battle I can pick to shield myself a little from MS?
You cannot be forced to give your employer access to your property, so just say that you cannot install it on your phone. Make sure you say that it isn’t possible. You don’t have to make it sound voluntary. You can just say “I cannot install this on my phone”. Even if the reason is because you refuse to install it, it doesn’t matter, that’s your call to make with your own property.
Your employer will either need to find another solution that you can use, or they will need to issue you a company phone so that you can use the mobile software they require you to use.
I work in tech, and have had multiple employees claim they only have “dumb” phones for what I’m pretty sure is this exact reason. And I never blame them, just put the heat on IT to find a solution.
And the solution isn’t even hard, since it should be “OK, take one of these FIDO2 tokens we have in stock for cases like this”
Yes. FIDO2 keys are awesome.
I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.
If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.
Also, the Microsoft Intune app, which checks if your device is compliant, requires a high level permission which allows it to remote wipe your device. This is in case your device has sensitive data and gets stolen/falls into the wrong hands. This is a very risky direction where we are handing off admin access of our phone to our employers.
You don’t need the Intune app to use the authenticator.
True, true. This is off-topic.
But I remember that for a certain scenario (I don’t remember exactly), my work app requested me download Intune, without which the app refused to start/update.