>if an employer demanded I install an app on my personal phone, I'd refuse.

I did that once. In very polite terms I told them that I like to keep personal and work activity separate as much as possible for personal and work security reasons and that if they issued me a phone with an app I'd be happy to carry it.

I got a very positive response. Ultimately they didn't think it was worth issuing me a phone and everyone went on happily.

> And, no, if an employer demanded I install an app on my personal phone, I'd refuse.

It’s increasingly common for employers to give payslips via a smartphone app; which needs to be installed on a personal phone of course.

I’m one of the very few people to make a stink about it. But they’ve accommodated me after a lot of back and forth.

Do you really consider your payslips as work stuff? From a legal point of view it seems unlikely that they could claimed your device was used for work if it was used to transmit payslips. To me this doesn't seem comparable to having Slack/Email on your personal phone which means that some corporate possibly classified info made it to your device.

It's the installation of a work specific app that would be the concern. We already know apps track behaviour, but your company knows exactly who you are and can track behaviour without aggregating it, thus getting a very clear view of what you do outside of work.

while I would for sure check the permissions of the app (and double-check my employment contract for the possible implications of installing that specific app and logging in with my corporate account).

Playing the devils advocate though: installing an app is not necessarily super invasive, especially if the app don't get any permissions (and / or is one of the apps that are ok with getting installed in for instance an android studio-style android emulator).

That said, for sure it would be super nice to be able to get a "real" information on what tracking things happen (unfortunately that's not realistic) and if there are requirements from the company for me to use the system (that would theoretically rely on the install of an android app for instance) I would personally require that I either get a company cell phone to install them on, or some sufficient guarantees (on the level of physical paper contracts signed signed by the head of HR) of what they will do.

Or if they would accept me installing the app (and their app manifests etc) on an android vm on my laptop (like you can get in android studio), in that case I guess it would maybe be kind of acceptable to do it (at least on the work laptop).

The limit I will personally go to on my personal devices is installing a (generic, unrelated to what the company asks me to do) TOTP app and registering 2fa auth in that app.

> which needs to be installed on a personal phone of course

I personally have never had a request for a company-provided work phone/tablet denied, if they required me to do anything on my personal phone that was critical for work.

If they ask why, I tell them I have a BlackBerry :) never been a problem

The day I needed to install anything on my phone for my mega-corp employer I went out and bought the cheapest Android phone I could find.

What was an interesting discovery was that PingID doesn't require a cellular data connection to work, so I was able to use the phone unregistered (so no network charge) and permanently in flight mode (to preserve the battery).

Even now after leaving that company I still haven't registered the phone or taken it off flight - I just connect to a personal wi-fi as necessary.

I did this at my current employer (NZ govt uses shitty third party services which really want to invade your privacy). Basically, nope, I'm not installing this closed source third party app (whose only job is to issue MFA tokens for access to the intranet) onto my personal phone. If you want me to install it, give me a separate phone. After a lot of finagling I finally learned this was just TOTP, and there was a way to get my TOTP seed so I could use any old TOTP client. No indication of this while talking to support or looking at the registration website, of course.