Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
Most likely IT has restricted MFA to MS Authenticator. I don't know if there is a workaround or if you should use it if there was. But I can totally understand you. Having no choice sucks.
Microsoft Authenticator does more than just TOTP codes. It allows IT departments to push https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/apps/app-management instead of MDM on personal devices.
For apps like Outlook, Teams, and OneNote the app data can be wiped without wiping the whole phone.
For any of that to work, Microsoft Authenticator has to be used as the “broker” for that authentication.
You could request a separate business phone or a per diem to pay for a separate business phone if you're concerned about privacy and your company being on your private phone. They might say no, but you can ask.
If you are on an Android device you can typically create a work profile where you can keep all work related apps separate.
If you’re forced to use Microsoft Authenticator for work, then it’s likely the IT department wants you using the push notification option for MFA and not MFA over SMS. Although the IT dept prefers this option as it is more secure, it is not always possible. Some employees may only have dumb flip phones that can only do SMS. Or they may have a Huawei phone that is not able to connect to the Google Play store to download Microsoft Authenticator. IT must make an exception in these cases unless IT is also supplying the employees’ phones.
Unrelated to original post but is push notification more secure than just typing the displayed random code?
It has become less secure due to a technique called MFA fatigue where the attacker repeatedly attempts to sign into your account. Each time a yes/no prompt is sent to your device. After a few dozen notifications the user may accidentally hit Yes. This is the exact technique a hacker used to completely own Uber last year. In response to the Uber hack, Microsoft now forces users to enter the random 2-digit number that arrives with the notification, in addition to accepting the yes/no prompt. This, of course, defeats the original purpose of the convenience of just tapping Yes on your phone vs. typing in a random code. (Or just tapping Yes on your watch, which I really miss.) The prompt will eventually become even more secure with a future update by displaying additional information, such as the geographic location the sign-in request is coming from. Maybe you share your login with someone else and you want to accept the prompt to help them get signed in, but why is this request coming from Madagascar? You get the idea. But this is only what Microsoft is doing with their push notification MFA. The original push notification MFA company, DUO, has not changed anything and is still susceptible to the MFA fatigue attack.