IPhone – How to Check for an Enterprise Provisioning Profile on an iPhone

enterpriseiphone

I know that iPhones with enterprise provisioning profiles installed send massive amounts of data back to the company that added the profile. This includes your text messages, phone records, and internet history.

How do I check if one of these profiles has been installed? I have an iPhone that I think a profile was installed on, but I see no indication anywhere in settings that this is true.

Best Answer

Go to Settings -> General and scroll all the way to the bottom. At the very bottom is "Reset". Above that is "Regulatory". Above that is "Profiles". If you have no profiles installed, this may not show up. In that case, you're fine. If a profile does come up click on it to get more information. The information page will tell you the name of the profile and who it's licensed to, like this:

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IOS – Do companies have IT “spyware” on corporate iPhones

Companies can choose to provide in-house apps to employees through the iOS Developer Enterprise Program without listing them on the Apple iOS App Store.

What you're asking about mainly falls into the realm of MDM (Mobile Device Management). One of the popular MDM solutions on iOS is Afaria, from SAP. Installation of the MDM app is made a mandatory requirement by some companies in order to allow employees to connect to corporate email (and other services). An MDM solution can be used to setup apps, accounts, impose corporate policies/restrictions on specific features and also enable remote wiping of the device through the provisioning of profiles.

Due to the application sandbox restrictions imposed by iOS, the MDM application does not have complete control over the device to snoop across every other application on the system and the OS. It cannot log keystrokes, network communication or data from the apps you use.

Read through the iPhone in Business page for details. Here are some relevant snippets:

While IT can interact with iPhone and iPad devices through an MDM server, not all settings and account information are exposed. IT can only manage corporate accounts, settings, and information provisioned via MDM. The user's personal accounts can’t be accessed.
...
...

Examples of what an MDM server can and can't see on an iOS device.

MDM can see:

Device name

Phone number

Serial number

Model name and number

Capacity and space available

iOS version number

Installed apps

MDM cannot see:

Personal mail, calendar, contacts

SMS or iMessages

Safari browser history

FaceTime or phone call logs

Personal reminders and notes

Frequency of app use

Device location

A few more points to note on this topic:

Apple may expand on the device monitoring and policy enforcement features in future releases of iOS.
One important prerequisite imposed by companies for allowing access to corporate email (and other resources) in exchange for installing MDM on the device is that the device must not be jailbroken. Companies that take security seriously would not allow (at least in their policies) jailbroken devices that could be vulnerable to all kinds of attacks (including, but not limited to, disabling or crippling the MDM app and/or the MDM policies pushed to the device).
Of course, if a device is jailbroken, then any malicious app could access and gather a lot more information than standard MDM solutions available now (however, no commercial enterprise solution would ask for the device to be jailbroken as a prerequisite).

IPhone – Browsing the Web through unlimited SMS plan

A week later, I found what I was looking for. After playing around with Google Voice and SMS APIs, I stumbled across an online service that offers exactly what I want, for free.

It's called txtWeb, and consists of just messaging 898-932 with your command, ex. @www YouTube.com returns:

(X)
(Y)Upload
* Home

* (Z)Trending
* 
      o (X) Home
      o (Z) Trending
  -----
* Best of YouTube

      o (A) Music
      o (B) Sports
      o (C) Gaming
      o (D) Movies
      o (E) TV Shows
      o (F) News
      o (G) Live
      o (H) Spotlight
      o (I) 360° Video
  -----
* 
      o (J) Browse channels
  -----
* Sign in now to see your 
channels and recommendations!

  (K)Sign in
  -----
* 
      o (L) YouTube Red
 (N) Show ad...<br/><br/>
Reply M for more<br/>---<br/><
br/><br/></body></html>

Which is a bit outrageous but fulfills exactly what I needed.

Other commands include @wikipedia [query], or @daak, which offers a rudimentary email checking interface for gmail.

Fun.

Best Answer

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IOS – Do companies have IT “spyware” on corporate iPhones

Examples of what an MDM server can and can't see on an iOS device.

IPhone – Browsing the Web through unlimited SMS plan

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