Private photos on a work or managed iPhone

First: is the phone managed?

Apple’s page on supervised devices gives two places to look.

1. The top of Settings. A supervised phone shows a message there.
2. Settings, General, VPN & Device Management. Any installed profile is listed. Tap it to see what it changes.

Apple also says supervision can only be turned on when a device is set up, so a personal phone you set up yourself isn’t supervised unless it was erased and set up again for work.

What a managing organization can do

From the same Apple page:

• Install profiles that switch features off, such as AirDrop or the App Store, update apps silently or filter what you browse.
• Monitor your internet traffic, which Apple says your organization may be able to do.
• See the phone’s location only by putting it in Managed Lost Mode, which locks it and shows a message on the screen.

Whatever the policy, the phone belongs to them. That is the point to plan around.

If it’s your own phone, enrolled for work

Some employers manage a phone you own instead of handing you one. Apple’s guide for organizations says that with User Enrollment, management is limited to your work account and the apps your employer installs, your personal Apple Account and data are never touched, and removing the enrollment removes only the organization’s data. If your phone was set up that way, your photos stay yours. If you aren’t sure which kind of management you have, ask your IT team before you assume.

If private photos are on it today

1. Decide where they go: your own phone, or a vault backed up to an account that is yours alone.
2. Move them, then delete the originals from the work phone’s Photos, and empty Recently Deleted there. To remove a deleted photo for good before the time is up, open Recently Deleted in Photos, select the photo, tap More, tap Delete and confirm, and Apple says you cannot get it back after that.
3. Check iCloud Photos on the work phone. If it is signed in to your personal Apple Account, photos may be syncing between both. If you use iCloud Photos and delete a photo on one device, it is deleted on all your other devices where you are signed in with the same Apple Account.

If you keep a vault on it anyway

Some people only have the one phone. If that’s you, first check your employer’s rules on personal apps, then know what you are relying on.

• Its contents stay encrypted on the phone. Each file gets its own random 256-bit key, and that key is sealed with your vault key. Your vault key is kept in the iPhone Keychain, on this device only, and it can be read only while the phone is unlocked.
• Its backup goes to the Apple Account on that phone, which should be yours, not a work account. Backup goes to your own iCloud account, not to a server of ours. Apple says the data an app keeps in a user’s CloudKit private database is accessible only to that user by default, isn’t visible in the developer portal, and counts toward the user’s iCloud storage.
• Save the recovery key somewhere off the phone. The recovery key is the only way to decrypt an iCloud backup on a new iPhone.

The week you leave

1. Export or move everything personal before the hand-back date. Viewing and exporting your own photos is always free. The export guide lists the ways.
2. Open the vault on your own phone from its backup, and check it. You can restore your vault on a new iPhone from your backup, with your recovery key. The backup and restore page walks through it.
3. Then delete the vault from the work phone. Deleting the app doesn’t delete your iCloud backup: Delete iCloud Backup in Settings does.

Where Sealed helps, and where it doesn’t

It helps keep personal files encrypted and behind their own passcode. Sealed has a passcode of its own, a gate inside the app that is separate from your iPhone passcode. Sealed creates each encrypted file with iOS Complete Protection, which Apple calls Class A.

It helps take them with you to your own phone. You can restore your vault on a new iPhone from your backup, with your recovery key.

It doesn’t survive the phone being erased unless its backup is on. If you delete Sealed from an iPhone while iCloud Backup is off, the vault on that iPhone is deleted with it.