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How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

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How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#1

Post by osuairt »

With the use of asset management software, iCloud accounts pose an issue for me.

If you receive a Mac from work, often times it requires an iCloud account. If you for example, want to respond to iMessages, or listen to your Music, you would have to login with your personal account.

If you were to create a separate iCloud account, then you will basically need to have two subscriptions for Music for example. And different ids you are contactable at.

In addition, assuming that they don't need to do password entry, an admin could view some contents of your iCloud account.

Is there a solution to this that might not be commonly known? Does this actually require me to have a separate iCloud account for work and home, and a separate Mac for work and home?

I understand that Apple are releasing a work and home mode for safari to help with some of this personal usage, but I think it is an issue, and a waste for people to maintain multiple iCloud accounts, purchase multiple machines, and have notes and other materials scattered across machines and accounts. At the same time, the company has an interest to be able to update or wipe the machine in case of security issues.

Would appreciate your opinions.

Re: How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#2

Post by zeroego »

I don't have a novel solution to your problem, but here's my experience. I had a mac laptop for a previous job and I went down the route of using separate a iCloud account. I used spotify so it was no issue in terms of music. The company was also heavily into the Microsoft office suite of products, but I opted to not use OneNote but instead used a password protected sync-able third party note app. I did this so I could have my notes if and when I left. I personally value a clear separation of my work and personal accounts so I found this worked pretty well for me.

Perhaps you could remote into your personal mac for iMessage/Music? It would be clunky but would protect your privacy.

Re: How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#3

Post by alejo »

I separate work from personal life as much as possible.

I create a new iCloud account with my work email and use that. I never use my iCloud account in my company’s hardware [0].

If I want to listen to music, I play it from my personal iPhone, which I have with me all the time and has all my personal accounts.

0: This is the same as I would use my work email to create a GitHub account and join my company’s organization, etc

Re: How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#5

Post by ironlake »

iOS developer here. I have separate Apple accounts for work and home. My phone is on my home account, so I don't have access to Teams or Outlook on that. And I don't use iMessage on my work machine because pretty much all company communication is in Teams or Outlook or some other work-related software. I have a separate github account for work and personal.

Re: How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#6

Post by iamwpj »

I sign into my work Mac with my personal iCloud account. I use most of the Apple features, but don't sync files. My login account is attached to Active Directory, and admins would have to sign in with a standard local account or their own AD account to manage my device. AFAIK there's no way to access the Photos.app contents from the filesystem. I haven't tried that hard, but you can't look in the directory in ~/Photos. I'm sure at some level most of this stuff is possible, but only in some extreme situation would anyone go that deep to access any of it.

I'm much more concerned about accidentally syncing work things out to iCloud than syncing personal things into my work environment.

Re: How do you manage your Apple accounts at work and at home?

#9

Post by positus »

iamwpj wrote: post #6

I sign into my work Mac with my personal iCloud account. I use most of the Apple features, but don't sync files. My login account is attached to Active Directory, and admins would have to sign in with a standard local account or their own AD account to manage my device. AFAIK there's no way to access the Photos.app contents from the filesystem. I haven't tried that hard, but you can't look in the directory in ~/Photo…

Seems like they would be accessible from:

/Users//Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals

If another user is a domain administrator (and depending on your AD configuration) they may be able to access the files in your home directory. Might want to check on that!

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