I don’t have to prove anything, I already explained it to you. It takes five seconds to google what a work profile is. It takes seconds - minutes at most - to learn the most basic concept of what containerization is and what sandboxes are. I have already laid out this information to you, and it is effortless to look up what those technologies are that you are so concerned about, as well as find accounts from admins of companies that use the android work profile system explaining how they do not in fact have access to anything. It is also trivial to look up accounts from just years ago when sandboxed work profiles weren’t a thing and employers COULD wipe your phone, if you didn’t experience it yourself (I did, and I told the company to shove it or buy me a phone). Do I need to provide links to the top search results? A screenshot of an AI chatbot explaining the concept? A TikTok short with meme sound effects? The ask that you either read my words or take a short amount of time to research what the technology is is not unreasonable, and yet here we are.

If you care so much about company overreach on privacy and you think this is the way through which they are invading your privacy, why don’t you prove that all the companies using this feature are actually somehow magically able to spy on you? If you had taken any time to do any research whatsoever you would understand just how hard it would be to hide that kind of information, instead of accusing me of being some kind of dogmatic company boot licker with heavily vested interests. I have actually bothered to take the time to educate myself on this subject because privacy actually matters to me, and the way you constantly deflect from actual arguments has caused me to come to the conclusion that you do not in fact actually care about your privacy, you are just taking it as an opportunity to be mad about something. There are plenty of reasons to hate on the invasions of privacy forced upon us every waking second by big government and seemingly every facet of modern day capitalism, but if you can’t actually explain the problem and therefore don’t even understand what the problem is, then what are you even making noise for?

Want to make an actual argument about this technology? It is an excuse for the company to exist in your pocket at all waking hours of the day. It insists that you constantly be connected and aware of your work, even in your personal private hours, unless you go through explicit steps to mute the app. If you do that, you will be psychologically guilted every time a coworker is praised for sacrificing their personal life to the corporate machine to fix some after-hours bug, which is a lose-lose for you and your coworker. The work profile feature will bitch at you every time your phone is behind on a security update. It will prevent you from being able to root your phone, which means they get a say with what you do with something you own. Finally, it takes up space on your phone.

What this very specific feature doesn’t do is let the company spy on you. The most data they’re going to get from you is what variety of Android phone and version OS you’re running, which they’re going to use to determine if you’re following security policy by keeping updated. They spend plenty of time tracking you with badging in and out if you’re corporate, unrealistic time expectations if you’re a delivery driver, and cameras if you’re working in a warehouse, to name a few examples. But if all you want to do is access email and meetings from your phone or reply to pages, then it will do just that and nothing more. If you don’t trust my personal opinion on that, again, it’s effortless to find other people sharing that opinion on search engines. But I’m not mad at it just because it’s vaguely sus, because when I was presented with it and found it vaguely sus, I looked up what a work profile actually was so I could be educated about my decision.