Let me shed some light here. I worked as a system administrator in an enterprise environment (monolithic services) before transitioning to DevOps. One of my roles was to manage MDM services for our office of several hundred users.

First, let me say that MDMs come in all shapes and sizes. Many different companies offer them and they all pretty much have the same features.

First, why do companies use MDM?

It’s not to track you. It’s for security purposes and security alone. Think of it this way, if you were working with classified or sensitive information and your phone was lost or stolen, wouldn’t you need to make sure the data is not compromised? What if your HR or payment records were on there? MDM provides a safety net to ensure the security of your device. It is NOT and I repeat, NOT designed for or intended to track you. Now, does that feature exist? Yes. But it is heavily secured and available only to MDM administrators who are under NDA anyway. If I ever had to track a device, I could only do so after the device was reported as lost and lost mode was enabled on the device by the MDM. This information stayed strictly confidential.

Second, what about my permission?

This will vary by company but in most places, your consent is automatically granted the moment you install anything work related on your phone or mobile device. On iOS devices, if the security settings on an existing app are being changed by the MDM platform, you will always be notified, same goes for installing device management certificates. You may also receive an email from your IT department outlining what MDM does (although this will vary by platform and company).

MDM does a lot of good. For example, when the Facetime vulnerability was discovered, guess who was protected first? That’s right. MDM users, as the issue was remediated on their devices first.

Besides, you have something more important to worry about: your mobile carrier’s MDM platform. While it’s not a true, full featured MDM system, it still poses many of the same privacy questions. Ever wondered how AT&T or Verizon push updates to your devices? It doesn’t happen magically, that’s their management platform. The scary part is that they owe nothing to you in terms of agreements. It’s all in their TOS (that long document you skipped over when you set up your device).

I’ll probably write a whole post on this because this is only the tip of the iceberg.

TL;DR, stop the scare tactics. MDM provided by your work is your friend. Your carrier is who you should be worried about.